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They come! they come! these Tuscan peasants, a trifle too fond of holiday-keeping, like their betters but what would you have? The land is fertile, and corn and wine and oil and rosy flowering almonds grow almost as of themselves. They come tens and tens of miles away, from out the deep shadows of primeval chestnut-woods, clothing the flanks of rugged Apennines with emerald draperies.

It was indeed true. Now that he was with me I loved him as well, indeed better than ever; but I had not been thinking very much about him. We went over the moorlands in the keen air, Amroth striding cleanly and lightly over the heather. Then we began to descend into the valley, through a fine forest country, somewhat like the chestnut-woods of the Apennines.

Far away stretch blue Apennines, ridge melting into ridge above Perugia in the distance. Gigantic oaks begin to clothe the stony hillsides, and little by little a fertile mountain district of chestnut-woods and vineyards expands before our eyes, equal in charm to those aërial hills and vales above Pontremoli. Caprese has no central commune or head-village.

On leaving Neuvic I noticed a woman carrying to the baker's a large dish of edible boleti, known to the French as cepes. This excellent fungus during the late summer and autumn is a very important article of food in France wherever there are extensive chestnut-woods.

Now we are in a sweet, sunbright, sheltered valley, where all is verdure and luxuriance. At every door are pink and white oleanders in full bloom, in every garden peach-trees showing their rich, ruby-coloured fruit the handsome-leaved mulberry, the shining olive, with lovely little chestnut-woods on the heights around. Now we seem in a wholly different latitude.

He loved the white walls of the monastery, the vine-clad slopes and olive groves around it, the glimpses of purple sea which one caught from time to time in the openings left in the chestnut-woods, where he had wandered so often when he was a boy. These things were dear to Dino: he had loved them all his life, and it was a veritable home-coming to him when he presented himself at San Stefano.

Undoubtedly they were still there, even in this halcyon weather, those causes of disquiet, like the volcanic forces beneath the massive chestnut-woods, spread so calmly through the breathless air, on the ledges and levels of the red heights of the Limousin, under which Gaston now passed on his way southwards.

I had been wading through bracken up to my neck, or wandering almost at hazard through chestnut-woods for an hour or two, when hope was revived by my meeting a peasant, who told me that I was not far from the village of Firmi. I left the great woods, and reached a district that was new in every sense.

At first the scenery resembles that passed through the day before, close under the embankment, the river flowing clear and bright between green slopes, hanging chestnut-woods, and sweeps of vineyards. The earth everywhere seems soaked with claret; and this wine-red colour of the soil, contracted with the golden-leafed vine, makes a landscape of wonderful brilliance.

Is it a philter brewed by the burning sunshine? or is it found in the deep shadows that brood in the radiance of the starry night? Is it in those sounds of music ever floating in the air? or in the solemn silence of the primeval chestnut-woods? Does it come in the crackling of the mountain-storm in the terror of the earthquake?