shepherds tending their shaggy
flocks and seeming barely raised above them in intelligence!

All this tends, as may be supposed, to civilize the buttero to a
degree that he would not attain without it. He is, as has been
intimated, generally eminently self-conscious of his own advantages
and proud of his position. To the other elements which go to produce
this feeling may be added the pride of caste. Our buttero is probably
the son and the father of a race which follows the same occupation.
The knowledge and skill which are absolutely necessary to his
profession, and which are acquired no otherwise than traditionally,
have a tendency to produce this result. He grew up to be a buttero,
with a consummate knowledge of horses and horned cattle, and a sure
eye for the condition of the pastures from one to another district of
which the animals are constantly moving, under the eye of his father,
who put him on a half-broken colt almost as soon as he could walk. And
he is giving his son the same education. For a young buttero to marry
with a daughter of the despised shepherd class would be a mesalliance
not to be thought of. Nor would a marriage with the daughter of a
small artisan of the towns be deemed a very acceptable one. The
chances are that the young centaur marries a girl of his own centaur
breed, and all the prejudice and barriers of caste are thus propagated
and intensified. It must not be supposed that the buttero or his
family lives on the malaria-stricken plains which his occupation
requires him to be constantly riding over. The wretched shepherd is
constrained to do so, and sleeps in the vicinity of his flock,
finding, if he can, the shelter of a ruined tomb or of the broken arch
of an aqueduct, or even of a cave from which _pozzolana_ has been dug,
and strives to exorcise the malaria fiend by kindling a big fire and
sleeping with his head in the thick smoke of it. But the buttero, well
mounted, to whom it is a small matter to ride eight or ten miles to
his home every night, lives with his family either in Rome or in one
of the small towns on the slopes of the hills which enclose the
Campagna. And it is thus that these strikingly picturesque figures may
often be seen traversing the streets and _piazze_ of Rome, and
especially of those parts of it which lie on the far side of the Tiber
or to the southward of the Quirinal Hill and the Piazza di Venezia.
They are almost always handsome fellows, well grown, and striki