Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
“I was born, and learned myne English in Kente,in the Weald, where English is spoken broad andrude.”
HERITAGE
NEW 
YORK
PART I
I
Two years of my life were spent in a roughgray village of the Apennines; a shaggy village,tilted perilously up the side of the hill;a rambling village, too incoherent to form asingle perspectived street, but which revolvedaround, or, rather, above and below, a littlepiazza warm with present sun, though grimwith unknown, conjectured violence in thepast. Here stood the massive civic palace,ancient and forbidding, with its tower poisedand tremulous in the evening sky; and herethe church, with its marble pietà, the work, itwas said, of Mino da Fiesole. A mountaintorrent poured down the village, a wild littlestorm of water, brown and white, spanned by12a bridge, which rose abruptly to a peak, andas abruptly descended. In the evenings theyouth of the village drifted towards thebridge, gossiped there, sang a snatch of song,or indolently fished. In the silent midday,stretched at length on the flat stone parapet,they slept....
The village was called Sampiero dellaVigna Vecchia.
If I dwell thus upon its characteristics, it isfrom lingering affection and melancholymemories. My sentiment is personal; irrelevantto my present purpose. I resume:—
In this village—and it is for this reasonthat the village started up so irrepressibly inmy thoughts—I had as a companion a mannamed Malory. Like me, he was there tostudy Italian. We were not friends; welodged in the same house, and a