We alighted in the centre of the village, in the midst of a ragged troop of women and children, among whom were two idiot beggars; and, while the preparations were making for our ascent, we took chairs in the open square around a basket of cherries, and made a delicious luncheon of fruit and bread, very much to the astonishment of some two hundred spectators.
Our conveyances appeared in the course of half an hour, consisting of two large baskets, each drawn by a pair of oxen and containing two persons, and a small Sardinian pony. The ladies seated themselves with some hesitation in their singular sledges; I mounted the pony, and we made a dusty exit from Pelago, attended to the gate by our gaping friends, who bowed, and wished us the _bon viaggio_ with more gratitude than three Tuscan _crazie_ would buy, I am sure, in any other part of the world.
The gray oxen of Italy are quite a different race from ours, much lighter and quicker, and in a small vehicle they will trot off five or six miles in the hour as freely as a horse. They are exceedingly beautiful. The hide is very fine, of a soft squirrel gray, and as sleek and polished often as that of a well-groomed courser. With their large, bright, intelligent eyes, high-lifted heads, and open nostrils, they are among the finest-looking animals in the world in motion. We soon came to the steep path, and the facility with which our singular equipages mounted was surprising. I followed, as well as I could, on my diminutive pony, my feet touching the ground, and my balance constantly endangered by the contact of stumps and stones--the hard-mouthed little creature taking his own way, in spite of every effort of mine to the contrary.
We stopped to breathe in a deep, cool glen, which lay across our path, the descent into which was very difficult. The road through the bottom of it ran just above the bank of a brook, into which poured a pretty fall of eight or ten feet, and with the spray-wet grass beneath, and the full-leaved chestnuts above, it was as delicious a spot for a rest in a summer noontide as I ever saw. The ladies took out their pencils and sketched it, making a group themselves the while, which added all the picture wanted.