Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/60

 She would seem to the law no more than any one of the hill-foxes that burrowed under the centaury and cinquefoil of some fern-grown bank.

True, in this land the pastoral life has been more general and more honoured than in any other; the shepherd still lives under his conical reed-thatched hut, the cattle-keeper still camps out amidst his bullocks and his horses on the thyme-sweet plains; their lives are much the same as that of the peasants of old who looked for the Pleiades as the bringers of spring, and saw, in the great Constellation of the North, oxen drawing the corn-wains of the gods across the sky. True, Maremma was so lonely, so wide, so virgin in its water-fed greenery, so severed by its season of disease from all the moving world, that such a life here was less strange than it would have been elsewhere, and the native mountaineer in the hillside woods, and the shepherd from the north on the rich grasslands, were nomads as utterly as ever were their forefathers in days when Pan and Faunus were the gods of the forest and pasture.

They would have understood well enough that the tombs made a good dwelling-place,