ore the stroke of noon, after I had said farewell to the
doctor, the innkeeper, and different good souls who had befriended me
during my sickness, we set forth out of the city by the Eastern gate, and
began to ascend into the Sierra. I had been so long a prisoner, since I
was left behind for dying after the loss of the convoy, that the mere
smell of the earth set me smiling. The country through which we went was
wild and rocky, 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.

'O, it is all right,' he said; and began encouraging his mule with cries
that echoed unhumanly