The Fountain Was In A Grotto-Like Nook, Where Benches Of Cement Decked With Scallop Shells Were Set Round A Basin With The Figures Of Two Small Boys In It Bestriding That Of A Lamb, All Employed In Letting The Water Dribble From Their Mouths.

It was very simple-hearted, as such things seem mostly obliged to be, but nature helped art out so well with a lovely abundance of leaf and petal that a far more exacting taste than ours must have been satisfied.

The garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it was worth fifteen pesetas and three hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself when he does it. I think it was, myself, and I would like to be there now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps, and letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes very small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and wheat-fields in that vast prospect, and certainly there were towns and villages; but what remains with me is the sense of olives and ever more olives, though this may be the cumulative effect of other such prospects as vast and as monotonous.

While we looked away and away, the gardener and a half-grown boy were about their labors that Sunday afternoon as if it were a week-day, though for that reason perhaps they were not working very hard. They seemed mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from the paths, and where the leaves had not fallen from the horse-chestnuts the boy was assisting nature by climbing the trees and plucking them. We tried to find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do not know why he was doing it, and I must be content to contribute the bare fact to the science of arboriculture. Possibly it was in the interest of neatness, and was a precaution against letting the leaves drop and litter the grass. There was apparently a passion for neatness throughout, which in the villa itself mounted to ecstasy.

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