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Some alps and chalets, dimly traced against the sky, are evidences that a pastoral life prevails above the vineyards. Pan there stretches the pine-thyrsus down to vine-garlanded Dionysos. The Adda flows majestically among willows in the midst, and the valley is nearly straight.
In the one season she clung all day to her wadded arm-chair, with her scaldino in her lap; and in the other season she found it a sufficient diversion to sit in the great hall of the palace, and be fanned by the salt breeze that came from the Adriatic through the vine-garlanded gallery.
Even then it is probable that the throng is mostly composed of slaves, household servants, and women of the lower bourgeoisie; but as they are all dressed in mauve and rose and pale green, with long earrings and jewelled head-bands flashing through their parted veils, the illusion, from a little distance, is as complete as though they were the ladies in waiting of the Queen of Sheba; and that radiant afternoon at Moulay Idriss, above the vine-garlanded square, and against the background of piled-up terraces, their vivid groups were in such contrast to the usual gray assemblages of the East that the scene seemed like a setting for some extravagantly staged ballet.
Thus they passed through glimmering hamlets, between high walls of orchards, past iron gates opening into cypress avenues with dim villas at the other end, terraces of vine-garlanded olive-trees, all of a dark silvery blue, and did not vouchsafe a look at anything but the inverted cup of the nocturnal sky.
"I did not," I said coldly; "but, of course, if I'm to call Pisa a grass widow, it will have to be. Although I warn you, poppa, that in case of any critic being able to arise and indicate that it is laid out in oyster beds, I shall make it plain that the responsibility is yours." We were speeding through Tuscany, and the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards clasped hands and danced along with us.
From all sides crowds are pressing toward Lucca. Before six o'clock every high-road is alive. Down from the highest mountain-top of Pizzorna, overlooking Florence and its vine-garlanded campagna, comes the hermit, brown-draped, in hood and mantle; staff in hand, he trudges along the dusty road.
As for the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian poplars, I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of these things as we.
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