racter, which yielded beneath the
hand of a woman, and which beneath the hand of a man might have broken,
but could never have been bended. Teresa was lively and gay, but
coquettish to excess. The two piastres that Luigi received every month
from the Count of San-Felice's steward, and the price of all the little
carvings in wood he sold at Rome, were expended in ear-rings, necklaces,
and gold hairpins. So that, thanks to her friend's generosity, Teresa
was the most beautiful and the best-attired peasant near Rome. The two
children grew up together, passing all their time with each other, and
giving themselves up to the wild ideas of their different characters.
Thus, in all their dreams, their wishes, and their conversations, Vampa
saw himself the captain of a vessel, general of an army, or governor of
a province. Teresa saw herself rich, superbly attired, and attended by a
train of liveried domestics. Then, when they had thus passed the day in
building castles in the air, they separated their flocks, and descended
from the elevation of their dreams to the reality of their humble
position.

"One day the young shepherd told the count's steward that he had seen a
wolf come out of the Sabine mountains, and prowl around his flock. The
steward gave him a gun; this was what Vampa longed for. This gun had
an excellent barrel, made at Breschia, and carrying a ball with the
precision of an English rifle; but one day the count broke the stock,
and had then cast the gun aside. This, however, was nothing to a
sculptor like Vampa; he examined the broken stock, calculated what
change it would require to adapt the gun to his shoulder, and made a
fresh stock, so beautifully carved that it would have fetched fifteen or
twenty piastres, had he chosen to sell it. But nothing could be farther
from his thoughts. For a long time a gun had been the young man's
greatest ambition. In every country where independence has taken the
place of liberty, the first desire of a manly heart is to possess a
weapon, which at once renders him capable of defence or attack, and, by
rendering its owner terrible, often makes him feared. From this moment
Vampa devoted all his leisure time to perfecting himself in the use of
his precious weapon; he purchased powder and ball, and everything served
him for a mark--the trunk of some old and moss-grown olivetree, that
grew on the Sabine mountains; the fox, as he quitted his earth on some
marauding excursion; the eagle