Along The Sides Occasional
Shade-Trees Stifled, And Beyond These Gaunt, Verdureless Fields Widened
Away, Though We Were Told That In The Spring The Fields Were Red With
Flowers And Green With Young Wheat.
There were no market-gardens, and
the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats.
In some of the
foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives
heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday
breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside;
our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was
"bad."
VII
We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we
met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and
very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came
to the village that was a _municipium_ under Augustus and a _colonia_
under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and
self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio
Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as we
glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide
flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless,
but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place
a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing
it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry.
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