His seemed to me (as I sat, distantly giving ear) a kind of conversation proper to drivers, who pass much of their time in a great vacancy of the intellect and threading the sights of a familiar country.
But this was not the case of Felipe; by his own account, he was a home- keeper; 'I wish I was there now,' he said; and then, spying a tree by the wayside, he broke off to tell me that he had once seen a crow among its branches.
'A crow ?' I repeated, struck by the ineptitude of the remark, and thinking I had heard imperfectly.
But by this time he was already filled with a new idea; hearkening with a rapt intentness, his head on one side, his face puckered; and he struck me rudely, to make me hold my peace.

Then he smiled and shook his head.
'What did you hear ?' I asked.
'O, it is all right,' he said; and began encouraging his mule with cries that echoed unhumanly up the mountain walls.
I looked at him more closely.

He was superlatively well-built, light, and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he was a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond that he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairyness; two characteristics that I disliked.

It was his mind that puzzled, and yet attracted me.

The doctor's phrase--an innocent--came back to me; and I was wondering if that were, after all, the true description, when the road began to go down into the narrow and naked chasm of a torrent.