Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/211

 no notion. If he had been asked how long he had lived, he would have said that he could not remember; he had been always on the moor, always with the goats; he knew what to do for them, and that was all he did know. His fathers before him had been shepherds, and he had been born in a hut made of reeds and bramble amidst the goats, and he had sucked them as the kids did, and grown up from a baby to a child amidst them, and then had had a goatskin garment girded about his loins, and a staff put in his small hand, and had been told to take the kids to pasture. That was all so long, long ago to him; he did not think these dead people that she spoke of could be so far away as that.

Nothing is so impossible for the uneducated mind to grasp as the idea of time. Musa only understood it with her imagination; her fancy enabled her to conjecture what her knowledge left a blank. But Zirlo had not this fatal gift; his mind had never got beyond the marsh and moor, the flock and fold. The bare bold scarp that was called San Lionardo was the outmost boundary of his world. As he thought that the ivy and the honeysuckle only grew for