with that single
hope before me. Days became weeks: I wandered miserably, like a dog
without master or home.

One day I saw her. Having on my shoulder my _girella_, which gave me a
pretext for straying along the river-side, I came to that part of
Etruria where (so I had used to learn from the school-books in my
childhood) the Etruscans in ancient times drew up in order of battle to
receive Fabius. The country is pretty about there, or at least it seemed
so to me. The oak woods descend to the edge of the Tiber: from them one
sees the snow of the Apennines; the little towns of Giove and Penna are
white on the Umbrian hills; in the low fields the vine and the olive and
the maize and the wheat grow together. Here one finds our Lagherello,
which I had heard scholars say is no other than the Lake Vadimon of
which Pliny speaks. Of that I know nothing: it is a poor little pool
now, filled with rushes, peopled with frogs. By the side of this pool I
saw her again: she looked at me. Like a madman I plunged into the water,
but the reeds and the lilies entangled me in their meshes: the long
grasses and water-weeds were netted into an impenetrable mass. I stood
there up to my waist in water, incapable of movement, like the poor
cattle of which Pliny tells, who used to mistake all this verdure for
dry land, and so drifted out into the middle of the lake. She looked at
me, laughed a little, and disappeared.

Before sunset I had learned who she was from a peasant who came there to
cut the reeds.

Near to the Lagherello is a villa named Sant' Aloisa: about its walls
there is a sombre, melancholy wood, a remnant of that famous forest
which in the ancient times the Romans dreaded as the borders of hell.
The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes
descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its
brakes counting by millions--sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood
in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and
barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow
shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river--built of stone,
fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without
garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a
living man that is blind.

This was and is Sant' Aloisa. In the old times, no doubt, the villa had
been strong and great, and peopled with a brilliant feudal pomp, and
noisy with the clash