Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 2.djvu/288

To suffer is a different thing under this sky. They have bad food, they work hard; but Nature is their friend; they are not pinched with cold nor racked by rheumatic pains. Thus my poor woman, in whom I grew interested, had nothing morose—scarcely anything plaintive—about her. “Sono sempre allegra,” she said. “I am gay—we ought to be gay.” “Siamo come Dio vuole.” “We live as God pleases, and must not complain. My heart aches when I remember my poor children now in Paradise; I cry when I think of them; and that little fellow,” and she cast an anxious, maternal glance on him—“he is not well” (heaven knows, he was not). “Ma, allegra, Signora”—“the Virgin will help us;” and she began, in a sweet voice, to sing a plaintive hymn to the Virgin. Poor people! their religion is hung round with falsehood; but it is a great, a real comfort, to them. Sickness and all evil comes from God, and must be borne, therefore, with patience; and the great duty is to be gay under all, and to serve God with a cheerful, as well as a pure, heart. I should have liked to have tried, at least, to have done some real good to this woman, whose countenance, and voice, and conversation, gave her distinction. Nothing could be more simple and unpretending than her talk; but it had a stamp of heart, joined to that