in the cloak and brigand’s hat that told you clearly enough that he knew he was riding remarkably well, and expected you to mark it too.  He would have been exceedingly unwilling that the glories of the scarlet waistcoat with its silver buttons should have been eclipsed, and he would have unmistakably fallen in his own esteem had the broad scarlet ribbon been taken from his hat.  The pose and turn of his well-shaped head on his shoulders provocatively challenged admiration, and would have had a dash of insolence in them if the expression had not been corrected by a pleasant smile, which showed a range of bright white teeth beneath a jet-black moustache, and the good-humor of the glance that tempered the frank roving boldness of the well-opened eye.  When it has been added that he was in the very prime of manhood, a man of some thirty-five or thereabouts, I think that the reader will be able to form a tolerably correct picture to himself of my acquaintance, Nanni Silvani.

“And who and what is Nanni Silvani?” asked my companion when I had categorically answered his question by stating the name of the rider whose salutation I had returned.

“Nanni—­or, more correctly, Signor Giovanni—­Silvani is a buttero of the Roman Campagna,” said I.

“And, pray, what may a ‘buttero’ be?” rejoined my Johnny Newcome, looking back after the receding figure of the horseman with no little curiosity.

“A buttero,” I answered, “is one of the most peculiar and characteristic products of that very peculiar region, the Agro Romano.”

The conditions under which the district around Rome is cultivated—­or rather possessed and left uncultivated—­are entirely sui generis—­quite unlike anything else in the world.  The vast undulating plain called the Campagna is divided among very few proprietors in comparison to its extent, who hold immense estates, which are more profitable than the appearance of the country, smitten to all seeming with a curse of desolation, would lead a stranger to suppose.  These huge properties are held mainly by the great Roman papal families and by monastic corporations whose monasteries are within the city.  In either case the property is practically inalienable, and has been passed from father to son for generations, or held by an undying religious corporation in unchanging sameness for many generations.  Cultivation in the proper sense of the word is out of the question in this region:  the prevalence of the deadly malaria renders it impossible.  But the vast extent of the plain is wandered over by large herds of half-wild cattle, in great part buffaloes, the produce of which is turned to profit in large dairy and cheese-making establishments, and by large droves of horses, from which a very useful breed of animals is raised.  The superintendence and care of these is the work of the buttero.  Large flocks of sheep and goats also are fed upon the herbage of the Campagna.