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The rising moon cast its pale beams upon the white walls of the cottage, the white seats of the terrace. There was no wind. The leaves of the oaks and the olive-trees beneath the wall were motionless. Nothing stirred. Above the cottage the moonlight struck on the rocks, showed the nakedness of the mountain-side.
I found an American family here, with whom I dined, Doyle and his wife, nice young people, Doyle agent for the great line of coaches to run to the frontier of the old States. All has gone to decay. The buildings are unused and ruinous, and the large gardens show now only wild cactuses, willows, and a few olive-trees.
The peasants were told they might spare a little if they liked to the ancient possessor of the soil; and so they took the ground, and they gave him the olive-trees. You may imagine how fertile these were, when the soil around them was utilised to the last fraction of productiveness. 'Is that a fair statement of the case? 'Can you ask the question? I'll show it to you in print.
Every Moor who can afford it has a garden, wherein he cultivates grapes and fruit-trees, a dim reflection of that Paradise of his, which must be chequered with acres of shade cast by great rocks and gigantic olive-trees; which must be abundantly watered by running brooks of milk, honey, and wine; whose soil shall be flour, white as snow.
On the way I spent half a day at Suhum a charming little town buried in luxuriant, un-Russian greenery, and one day at the Monastery, at New Athos. It is so lovely there at New Athos that there is no describing it: waterfalls, eucalyptuses, tea-plants, cypresses, olive-trees, and, above all, sea and mountains, mountains, mountains.
It was answered from a distance, first by a single voice; but then another took it up, and another; and then another. Slowly so the soft night was filled with musical cries which quavered about me as fitfully as fire-flies gleam and glance in all quarters of a garden of olive-trees.
There were strange monuments breaking the sky-line; there were statues and fountains gleaming in the sunlight; there were hedges of rose and myrtle outlining the terraced gardens on the hill-slopes, where rioted all manner of fruits and bloom: back of them the vineyards of Varoschia lemons, burning like topaz against the dark thatch of their glossy leaves, and near them the thin gray of the olive-trees, outlining with pale shadow the forests that spread to the mountains.
We passed into the porch in the rear, and approached the stairway. "Let us go below can you see any light?" I stooped and looked down. I could neither hear nor see any signs of life. I turned, and was gazing up at my friend in wonderment, when my eye was attracted by a strange movement upon the low branches of the olive-trees.
The same spirit is always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting what it owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and to the palm-trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of Proserpine.
The bullet itself he took out of his waistcoat pocket, and holding it towards Beppo, asked, "Hadn't it a mark?" "Yes, sir, I cut a cross on it," replied the abashed climber of olive-trees; "and by all the Saints, there it is still! Pasqualina, my girl," turning to her, "your uncle's ghost will turn out to be somebody." "Bravo! Beppo," cried the Doctor.
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