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Updated: June 25, 2025
Most of the hills through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus, and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards, olive-gardens, and meadows.
Feed a measure of it every day to each steer; or if they have not been worked it will be sufficient to let them pasture the mast beds. Another good feed is a measure of grape husks which you shall have preserved in jars. By day turn the cattle out and at night feed twenty-five pounds of hay to each steer. If hay is short, feed the leaves of the ilex and ivy.
The site chosen was the topmost of two wide terraces descending to a stream, from whose farther bank a great hill rose abruptly, dark with pine and ilex, and cleft into a formidable nullah. On the right, flat house-tops of a walled native village overlooked the terrace, with its inviting group of trees, beneath which breakfast was in preparation.
"There are stories I have heard the Signorina sees these ilex trees? Over yonder was a great one in my father's day, and the old Count Accolanti would have it cut. He came to watch it as it fell, and the tree tumbled the wrong way and struck him so that he half lost his wits. There are who say that the tree god was angry.
The fairy-tale went on next day, when, after wending our way through the dirty, crooked little streets, we crossed a courtyard and descended a long subterranean stairway to emerge on a magnificent terrace with a heavy marble balustrade, whence flights of steps led down to lower grades, amid statues, urns, vases, fountains, reservoirs, camellias in bloom mingled with laurel and myrtle and laurustinums covered with creamy flowers, cypresses tall as cathedral spires, ilex avenues, and broad straight walks between huge walls of box: the whole space was filled with the song of nightingales, the tinkle of falling water, with whiffs of aromatic shrubs and the breath of hidden roses and violets; a princely garden, a royal pleasaunce, but in exquisite disorder and neglect; the shrubbery too thick and straggling, the flowers straying beyond their rightful boundaries, the statues stained and moss-grown, the balusters entangled in clinging luxuriance, the fountains dripping through fern and maiden-hair Nature supreme, as one always sees her in this land of Art.
The eighteenth century still seems very near as we walk in those streets and look in, through the railings, at the ilex and laurel quincunxes, the lichened statues of that garden; and from the roof of the house still floats, creaking in the wind, regardless of the triumph of the Hanoverians, unconscious of the many banners which have been thrown, mere heaps of obsolete coloured tatters, on the dust-heap, a rusty metal weather-vane, bearing the initials of Carolus Rex, the last successor of the standard that was raised in Glenfinnan.
But lord Aeneas, hearing Turnus' name, abandons the walls, abandons the fortress height, and in exultant joy flings aside all hindrance, breaks off all work, and clashes his armour terribly, vast as Athos, or as Eryx, or as the lord of Apennine when he roars with his tossing ilex woods and rears his snowy crest rejoicing into air.
That February morning was cloudless, and Rome on her seven hills was flooded in sunshine. The birds were singing in the ilex wood as Olive passed through, and Camille was singing too in his atelier: "'Derrière chez mon père Vive la rose. Il y a un oranger Vive ci, vive l
The children had been to the particular hiding- places each knew best, Tim to the dirty nook between the ilex and the larder window, and Judy to the scooped-out trunk of the rotten elm, and both together to the somewhat smelly channel between the yew trees and a disused outhouse all equally untenanted. In the latter gloomy place, in fact, they met.
After trying vainly to convince me of my failure to perform a social duty, he went out to the establishment of a coffee-seller across the street, who kept his cups and brazier in the hollow trunk of the old ilex tree, and set stools for his customers beneath its shade, encroaching on the public street. Thither I followed after a few minutes, and found him telling everybody of the theft.
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