MARIA.
Back When Maria had come a little to herself, I ask'd her if she remembered a pale thin person of a man, who had sat down betwixt her and her goat about two years before? She said she was unsettled much at that time, but remembered it upon two accounts: - -that ill as she was, she saw the person pitied her; and next, that her goat had stolen his handkerchief, and she had beat him for the theft;--she had wash'd it, she said, in the brook, and kept it ever since in her pocket to restore it to him in case she should ever see him again, which, she added, he had half promised her. As she told me this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket to let me see it; she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine leaves, tied round with a tendril;--on opening it, I saw an S. marked in one of the corners.
She had since that, she told me, stray'd as far as Rome, and walk'd round St. Peter's once,--and return'd back;--that she found her way alone across the Apennines;--had travell'd over all Lombardy, without money,--and through the flinty roads of Savoy without shoes: --how she had borne it, and how she had got supported, she could not tell;--but GOD TEMPERS THE WIND, said Maria, TO THE SHORN
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