o has come
to the town to lead the life _she_ leads. She may be sure the old people
have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have

"Twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage,
Made a dung-hill of her garden!"

She acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her
fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall--

"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"

--and the noise the wasps made, eating the long papers that were strung
there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . As she murmurs thus to
herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before,
laughs now again: "Would I be such a fool!"--and tells _her_ wish. The
country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of
nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but Zanze has a
real desire, something worth talking about! It is that somebody she
knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her
the same treat he gave last week--

"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,
Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"

while she had stained her fingers red by

"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words with
On the bright table: how he laughed!"

And as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground
before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft
of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. The country girl recalls a
superstition connected with these bright beetles--that if one was
killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days.
They said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others
scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed she _is_
no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got--does Cecco beat her
still? But Cecco doesn't matter, nor the loss of her young freshness,
so long as she keeps her "curious hair"--

"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hair
Your colour . . .
. . . The men say they are sick of black."

A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one
that very likely "the men" are sick of _her_ hair, and does she pretend
that _she_ has tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of
this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers
exclaims--

"Why there! Is not that Pippa
We are to talk to, under the window--quick-- . . ."

The country gir