ocky, partially covered with rough
woods, now of the cork-tree, and now of the great Spanish chestnut, and
frequently intersected by the beds of mountain torrents. The sun shone,
the wind rustled joyously; and we had advanced some miles, and the city
had already shrunk into an inconsiderable knoll upon the plain behind
us, before my attention began to be diverted to the companion of my
drive. To the eye, he seemed but a diminutive, loutish, well-made
country lad, such as the doctor had described, mighty quick and active,
but devoid of any culture; and this first impression was with most
observers final. What began to strike me was his familiar, chattering
talk; so strangely inconsistent with the terms on which I was to be
received; and partly from his imperfect enunciation, partly from the
sprightly incoherence of the matter, so very difficult to follow clearly
without an effort of the mind. It is true I had before talked with
persons of a similar mental constitution; persons who seemed to live (as
he did) by the senses, taken and possessed by the visual object of the
moment and unable to discharge their minds of that impression. His
seemed to me (as I sat, distantly giving ear) a kind of conversation
proper to drivers, who pass much of their time in a great vacancy of the
intellect and threading the sights of a familiar country. But this was
not the case of Felipe; by his own account, he was a home-keeper; "I
wish I was there now," he said; and then, spying a tree by the wayside,
he broke off to tell me that he had once seen a crow among its branches.

"A crow?" I repeated, struck by the ineptitude of the remark, and
thinking I had heard imperfectly.

But by this time he was already filled with a new idea; hearkening with
a rapt intentness, his head on one side, his face puckered; and he
struck me rudely, to make me hold my peace. Then he smiled and shook his
head.

"What did you hear?" I asked.

"Oh, it is all right," he said; and began encouraging his mule with
cries that echoed unhumanly up the mountain walls.

I looked at him more closely. He was superlatively well-built, light,
and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very
large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he was
a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond that
he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairiness; two characteristics
that I disliked. It was his mind that puzzled, and