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He stepped out into the sunlight again, and wandering through archway and cloister found himself at length beyond the college walls and at the junction of two avenues of elms, between the trunks of which shone the acres of a noble meadow, level and green. The avenues ran at a right angle, east and south; the one old, with trees of magnificent girth, the other new and interset with poplars.
Both slopes are pleasantly wooded, and tall beeches, interset here and there with pines a pretty contrast in the spring spread their boughs over the road; which is cut cornice-wise, with a low parapet hedge to protect it along the outer side, where the ground falls steeply to the water-meadows, that wind like a narrow green riband edged by the stream with twinkling silver.
For all that, he found speedy consolation in the thought that at ten o'clock a new 'subject' was coming to sit to him: a wrinkled hag, whom he had met on his way back from Jundraghat, bent half double under a towering load of grass, her neutral-tinted tunic and draped trousers relieved by the scarlet of betel-nut on her lips and gums, and by a goat's-hair necklet strung with raw lumps of amber and turquoise, interset with three plaques of beaten silver; the only form of savings bank known to these simple children of the hills.
The house has been restored by the Marquis de la Vega, according to his notion of an old Spanish house, and has the pleasantest small patio in the world, looked down into from a carved wooden gallery, with a pavement of red tiles interset with Moorish tiles of divers colors.
Surrounding that opulent little city were farms and vineyards and olive-orchards a gentle wilderness interset with garden-hidden villas whereto the citizens retired to take their ease; and more widely about it was the broad Rhône Valley, then as now a rich store-house of corn and wine and oil.
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