om he presently
brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.

The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest
of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the
north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder
acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and
I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if
it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette
Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of
people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church,
however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had
just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored,
and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other
edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance
might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the
harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts
of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village
and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been
our landmark in the ascent.

Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all
doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his
wife's invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the
kitchen--welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain
below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from
the women here the wail of the shepherds: "Ah, lords! is it not a
miserable land?" and I began to doubt whether the love which I had
heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether
fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us
with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came
in.

He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the
bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude,
where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens
seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some
of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we
prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine
with us.

After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we
had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that
their ancestors had fled to t