I asked whether he had not children to work for him.
"All dead - and health to you!" he replied, shaking his white head
dolefully.
And no grandchildren?
"All Americans (emigrants)."
He spoke in dreamy fashion of years long ago when he, too, had
travelled, sailing to Africa for corals, to Holland and France; yes, and
to England also. But our dockyards and cities had faded from his mind;
he remembered only our men.
"Che bella gioventu - che bella gioventu!" ("a sturdy brood"), he kept
on repeating. "And lately," he added, "America has been discovered." He
toiled fourteen hours a day, and he was 83 years old.
Apart from that creature of fiction, the peasant in fabula whom we all
know, I can find little to admire in this whole class of men, whose talk
and dreams are of the things of the soil, and who knows of nothing save
the regular interchange of summer and winter with their unvarying tasks
and rewards. None save a Cincinnatus or Garibaldi can be ennobled by the
spade. In spleenful moments, it seems to me that the most depraved of
city-dwellers has flashes of enthusiasm and self-abnegation never
experienced by this shifty, retrogressive and ungenerous brood, which
lives like the beasts of the field and has learnt all too much of their
logic.
