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Sometimes the tubs attract the careful superintendent: he turns up the clusters, to ascertain that no leaves nor useless length of tendril are entombed in the juicy masses, and anon directs his steps to the pressing-trough, anxious to find that the lusty treaders are persevering manfully in their long-continued dance.

The fox is no great talker, but the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once, gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light treaders, the split-feet, so that the solitary camper sees their eyes about him in the dark sometimes, and hears the soft intake of breath when no leaf has stirred and no twig snapped underfoot.

A great part were ignorant Italians, of a regiment that had suffered heavily in Catalonia. The rest were mere diggers of the soil, treaders of grapes or hewers of wood, who had been suddenly and violently preferred to the glorious state of soldiers.

The tragedy of war has in no essential altered. The god Poseidon mourns over Troy as he might over the cities of to-day, when he cries: "How are ye blind, Ye treaders down of cities, ye that cast Temples to desolation, and lay waste Tombs, the untrodden sanctuaries where lie The ancient dead; yourselves so soon to die!"

The little cup that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no more, though all the purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to the brim, and the treaders stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes of the stony vineyards of Spain.

And the Bullier, ghost now of the old Bullier where once little Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundred palettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier with its coloured electricity and ragtime band and professional treaders of the Avenue de l'Observatoire, is eke romance to his nostril.

And gladness is taken away, and joy out of the plentiful field; and in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be shouting: the treaders shall tread out no wine in their presses; I have made their vintage shouting to cease. Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kirharesh.

The treaders big, perspiring men, in shirts and tucked-up trousers spattered to the eyes with splatches of purple juice, lean upon their wooden spades, and wipe their foreheads. But their respite is short. The creak of another cart-load of tubs is heard, and immediately the wagon is backed up to the broad open window, or rather hole in the wall, above the trough.

The treaders stamp diligently amid the masses, and the expressed juice pours plentifully out of a hole level with the bottom of the trough into a sieve of iron or wicker-work, which stops the passage of the skins, and from thence drains into tubs below. Suppose, at the moment of our arrival, the cuvier for a brief space empty.

They are light treaders, the split-feet, so that the solitary camper sees their eyes about him in the dark sometimes, and hears the soft intake of breath when no leaf has stirred and no twig snapped underfoot. The coyote is your real lord of the mesa, and so he makes sure you are armed with no long black instrument to spit your teeth into his vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold and curious.