But the shepherds who tend them are quite a different race of men from the buttero, and are deemed, especially by himself, to hold a far inferior position in the social scale.  And, as is ever the case, social prejudice justifies itself by producing the phenomenon it has declared to exist.  The shepherd of the Campagna, having long been deemed the very lowest of the low, has become such in reality.  Clad in the dried but untanned skin of one of his flock, he has almost the appearance of a savage, and, unless common fame belies him, he is the savage he looks.  The buttero looks down upon him from a very pinnacle of social elevation in the eyes of every inhabitant of the towns and villages around Rome, especially in those of the youthful female population.  While the poor shepherd, shaggy as his sheep, wild-looking as his goats, and savage as his dogs, squalid, fever-stricken and yellow, spending long weeks and even months in solitude amid the desolation of the Campagna, saunters after his sauntering flock, crawling afoot, the gallant buttero, in the saddle from morning to night, represents that aristocracy which among all uncivilized races and in all uncivilized times is the attribute of the mounted as distinguished from the unmounted portion of mankind.  And if this fact is recognized by the generality of the world in which he lives, it is very specially assumed to be undeniable by the buttero himself.  There is always a smack of the dandy about him.  He is proud of his appearance, of his horse and of his mastery over him.  He knows that he is a picturesque and striking figure, and the consciousness of the fact imparts a something to his bearing that is calculated to make the most of it.  His manners and ways of life, too, are really more tinctured by civilization than those of the rest of the rural population among whom he lives.  And this arises mainly from the fact that his occupations bring him more and more frequently into contact with his superiors in the social scale.  The agricultural system prevailing in the district around Rome differs markedly and essentially from that in use generally in Tuscany.  There the system of rent is almost unknown.  The present tiller of the soil occupies it on condition of rendering to the landowner the half of the produce of it, and this arrangement is conducted under the superintendence of a fattore.  But the widespreading possessions of a Roman landowner are for the most part let to a speculator, who is termed a “mercante di campagna.”  The commercial operations engaged in by these “merchants of the country” are often very extensive, and many of them become very wealthy men.  It is hardly necessary to say that neither they nor their families live on, or indeed in most cases near, the land from which they draw their wealth.  They are absentees, with a paramount excuse for being so.  For the vast plains over which their herds and flocks and droves wander are for the most part scourged by the malaria to such an extent that human life, or at all events