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The clear blue water, land- locked with mountains; the meadows on the shore, gay with their lilies of the field, on which our Lord bade them look, and know the bounty of their Father in heaven; the rich gardens, olive-yards, and vineyards on the slopes; the towns and villas scattered along the shore, all of bright white limestone, gay in the sun; the crowds of boats, fishing continually for the fish which swarm to this day in the lake; everywhere beautiful country life, busy and gay, healthy and civilized likewise and in the midst of it, the Maker of all heaven and earth sitting in a poor fisher's boat, and condescending to tell them where the shoal of fish was lying.
Then for a few minutes they drove on in silence past the orchards, past the olive-yards, yellow underneath with ripening corn; past the sudden wide views of the mountains, faintly crimson in the midst of heat, and, on the other side, of Florence, the towers and domes steaming beside the hazy river. "How hot it looks down there!" cried Goneril.
And she sprang from the platform into his arms.... A vision of a lofty window in Athens, looking out over far olive-yards and gardens, and the bright roofs and basins of the Piraeus, and the broad blue sea, with the purple peaks of Aegina beyond all.... And a dark-eyed boy, with his arm around her neck, pointed laughing to the twinkling masts in the far harbour, and called her sister.... The dead soul woke within her; and with a wild cry she recoiled from him in an agony of shame, and covering her face with both her hands, sank down among the blood-stained sand.
A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and unchanging surf idle among spiritless idlers not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change.
The sheep here are all lean and dirty-looking, few in number too; but the better the soil the worse the mutton we know, and here is no land to throw away, where every inch turns to profit in the olive-yards, vines, or something of much higher value than letting out to feed sheep.
Give back to them at once their fields, their vineyards, their olive-yards, and their houses, and whatever you have made them pay for the money, the grain, the new wine and the oil." Then they said, "We will give them back and will ask nothing from them; we will do even as you say." Then I called the priests and made them solemnly promise that they would do as they had said.
He shall take your fields, your vine-yards, and your olive-yards, and give them to his servants. He shall take the tyth of your corne and wine, and give it to the men of his chamber, and to his other servants. He shall take your man-servants, and your maid-servants, and the choice of your youth, and employ them in his businesse.
The freshness of evening came all of a sudden, and with it a scent of every kind of leaf and herb and fern, and the sweetness of the ripening corn all round. And when I got to the ridge, slippery with dry cut grass, what should I see in front of me, over the olive-yards and the wooded slopes, but the walls and towers of Serravalle, which have beckoned to my fancy almost ever since my childhood.
Steeps clothed from top to bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone; slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus; olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and southward over a hundred miles of sea this is Capri.
Oh, mother, mother, how much happier your son would have been if you had reared him in the place where he was born, amongst the vines and olive-yards of his native land. "And I must see Dino to-morrow. So he knows the whole story. I understand now why he thought ill of me for not coming to meet him, poor fellow! I must go early to-morrow."
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