Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/117

 tinkering up his own old boat and humming to himself that song of the coast,

Chi va in Maremma, saluti il bel giglio Che sta sulle montagne di Solia!

He was called Andreino, or Little Andrew, perhaps for no other reason than that he was a very tall, lean, angular man; bent and yellow, and very old; so old that his age was lost even to himself in the fog of some irrevocable and inconceivable past.

'Avante 'l regno dei Francesi,' he would say with a vague sense of unlimited ancientness. When a boy he had been very nearly shot by a squadron of French lancers, and this had impressed the epoch of invasion on him; and most things with him were referred to that time.

He was a garrulous man, and had many stories, mythical and fantastical, in which he believed; things that he had seen and done in real truth, but which had become distorted or transfigured, according to their kind through the loss of his many years. To these tales Santa Tarsilla always listened in the long hot evenings of the weary summer, when not a hand had scarcely