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Although he rode with saddle and bridle, he apparently used neither stirrups nor reins, and it was a wonder to see how the man kept his seat as he did with his legs sticking out rigid as two vine-props and his arms held stiffly against his sides.
There is, of course, a prohibitive duty on every article or implement manufactured abroad; there is the octroi, a relic of medisevalism, the most unscientific, futile, and vexatious of taxes; there are municipal dues to be paid on animals bought and animals sold, on animals kept and animals killed, on milk and vine-props and bricks, on timber for scaffolding and lead and tiles and wine on every conceivable object which the peasant produces or requires for his existence.
To the warmest zone of olives, lemons and carobs succeeds that of the chestnuts, some of them of gigantic dimensions and yielding a sure though moderate return in fruit, others cut down periodically as coppice for vine-props and scaffoldings.
Its wood is compact and heavy, weighing forty-four pounds to the cubic foot. In France it is much used in turnery; and wine-casks are made from it, as it gives to white wines an agreeable flavour of violets. Vine-props and fences are made from its branches; and out of its bark by a process which I have not time to describe a cloth can be manufactured almost as fine as silk itself.
On walls and stone-heaps the little lizards darted about, innumerable; in vineyards men were at work dismantling the vine-props, often singing at their task. From Bagnoli, still walking merely that a movement of his limbs might accompany his busy thoughts, he went along by the seashore, and so at length, still long before midday, had come to Pozzuoli.
It yields good turpentine, but trees that have been tapped to procure this are of no use afterwards for building purposes. The larch is said not to make good masts for ships, but its durability in all varieties of temperature and changes of weather make it valuable for vine-props. When made of larch-poles these are never taken up as hop-poles are.
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