tted, serpentine growth imprisoned within its strong embrace
the friend that had supported its tender infancy; and how (as seemingly
flexible natures are prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree
entirely to its own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms on
every bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its own. It
occurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the vine, in his native land,
might here have seen an emblem of the remorseless gripe, which the habit
of vinous enjoyment lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, and
letting him live no life but such as it bestows.

The scene was not less characteristic when their path led the two
wanderers through some small, ancient town. There, besides the
peculiarities of present life, they saw tokens of the life that had long
ago been lived and flung aside. The little town, such as we see in our
mind's eye, would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them away; but in the
lofty upper portion of the gateway, still standing over the empty arch,
where there was no longer a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote,
and peaceful doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in the
open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the town wall, on the
outside an orchard extends peacefully along its base, full, not of
apple-trees, but of those old humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted
boughs, the olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the gray, martial
towers, crowned with ruined turrets, have been converted into rustic
habitations, from the windows of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a
door, that has been broken through the massive stonework where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing grain. Small
windows, too, are pierced through the whole line of ancient wall, so
that it seems a row of dwellings with one continuous front, built in a
strange style of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers and
earthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines and
running flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over the
roughness of its decay.

Finally the long grass, intermixed with weeds and wild flowers, waves
on the uppermost height of the shattered rampart; and it is exceedingly
pleasant in the golden sunshine of the afte