see them coming
in little processions, winding through the forest that clothed the
plains below--pausing on the banks of the stream Pedea, to gather
water-bloom and rushes to scatter before the shrine of San Triphilio, in
memory of the early days when the city had sprung from the marshes to
stand--fair and firm upon the hillside above them, beautiful to
behold--girt about with impregnable walls and gateways, guarded by its
famous citadel, and fortified within by churches dedicated to many
saints.

To-day the gates stood hospitably open, to welcome the people who came
and went unchallenged through them, wearing their holiday faces and
bearing their burden of bloom and green--lotus flowers for the altars,
and rushes to scatter on the steps before them--pausing before they
entered the sacred precincts to lave their hands in the 'Fountain of
Ablution.'

It was truly a _festa_ of the people, and the Cyprian peasants who were
a gentle, superstitious, ignorant race, devoutly subject to their
priests and trained to the letter of their religious rites, came in from
the mountains and the neighboring villages in numbers but rarely seen
in the city: a motley throng--yet no shepherd among them was too poor to
wear the boot of dark-green leather reaching to the knee--the _bodine_
roughly fashioned and tough enough to protect them from the bites of the
serpents which infested the island.

Here and there some shepherd was leading with pardonable pride a sheep
who gave a more than usual promise of fine wool, its extraordinary tail,
bushy with soft long fleece, carefully spread out on the tiny cart to
which it was harnessed for its own protection. It came, meek-eyed and
wondering, if a little weary, to this _festa_ of San Triphilio, to whom
its first shearing would be vowed, as a special tribute to the saint and
a talisman to shield the flocks upon the mountains.

The shepherd might draw himself away, perchance, with a mingling of
caste-feeling and of superstition, from some poorer villager of the sect
of the "Linobambaki"--a dark, unkempt figure, with his scarlet fez, his
string of undressed poultry hanging from his shoulder, even on this day
of _festa_ when the saints give all good Christians holiday! But he,
poor man, was neither Christian nor pagan--a wonder that the good Lord
made him so!--(expressed with devout crossing and genuflexion)--and he
would sell a fowl on a holiday for the asking and the few copper
_carcie_ that it w