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The Campagna song is to be heard not only in the Campagna, but everywhere in the country, in the vineyards, in the grain-fields, in mountain and valley, from companies working together, and from solitary contadini, wherever the influence and sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt. The moment we get into Tuscany, on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be lost.
Radiata, mollusca, feathers, flowers, ferns, mosses, palms, pines, grain-fields, leaves of cedar, chestnut, elm, acanthus: these and multitudes of other objects are figured on your frosty window; on sixteen different panes I have counted sixteen patterns strikingly distinct, and it appeared like a show-case for the globe.
On either side, a long shelf of cultivated land sloped down to the top, and the mountain streams, after watering a multitude of orchards and grain-fields, tumbled over the cliffs in long, sparkling cascades, to join the roaring flood below.
Besides these, there were houses at considerable distances from one another, without any order, or any trace of streets or village, placed along the banks of the rivers, and surrounded by their grain-fields and groves.
We took the wrong road, but were set aright by a herdsman, and after threading a lane between thriving grain-fields, were cheered by the sight of the Temple of OEzani, lifted on its acropolis above the orchards of Chavduer, and standing out sharp and clear against the purple of the hills.
Their affection for us is great; they bring their children and sick that we may bless them, and in the street they fall upon their knees to receive the benediction. They make frequent use of holy water for their houses, at their meals, in their grain-fields, and for their sick; indeed, to drink a swallow of it they consider an efficacious remedy.
For his service as soldado of old Spain he had been granted many acres near the Mission of Dolores and his son, through marriage, had combined this with another large estate. There a second generation of the Garvez family had looked down from a palatial hacienda upon spreading grain-fields, wide-reaching pastures and corrals of blooded stock.
Their offering was a sort of grateful acknowledgment that God had delivered their grain-fields from the plague of locusts, and themselves from the sickness. Care was taken to check offenses against our Lord, and to break up vile illicit relations some secretly, and others by other gentle means by which many Indian women were kept in bondage.
Late in the afternoon, when the same stillness reigns, the same scenes are repeated. There is a black variety, quite rare, but mating freely with the gray, from which it seems to be distinguished only in color. The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.
In spite of the year of drought which had scorched up the grain-fields, and given a character of aridity to the landscape, it had a distinctive soft beauty of tint and outline, seen in the favoring light we have mentioned.
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