whatever
appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end,
to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving
track. Chance and change love to deal with men's settled plans, not with
their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events,
we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the
future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and
shatters our design in fragments.

The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to perform much of
their aimless journeyings under the moon, and in the cool of the morning
or evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had hardly begun to
trail its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to allow
of noontide exposure.

For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon had
viewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soon
began to enjoy the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse of
a day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is so natural
for mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of that primitive
mode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years.
Kenyon's cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed
to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the time
that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. His
perceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid so
thoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with a
hundred agreeable scenes.

He delighted in the picturesque bits of rustic character and manners, so
little of which ever comes upon the surface of our life at home. There,
for example, were the old women, tending pigs or sheep by the wayside.
As they followed the vagrant steps of their charge, these venerable
ladies kept spinning yarn with that elsewhere forgotten contrivance,
the distaff; and so wrinkled and stern looking were they, that you might
have taken them for the Parcae, spinning the threads of human destiny.
In contrast with their great-grandmothers were the children, leading
goats of shaggy beard, tied by the horns, and letting them browse on
branch and shrub. It is the fashion of Italy to add the petty industry
of age and childhood to the hum of human toil. To the eyes of an
observer from the Western world, it was a strange spectacle to see
sturdy, sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, b