retty, and it smirks accordingly. The
town, stretching, with its gayly tinted houses, round a level semicircle
at the edge of the water, smiles, as one may say, from ear to ear. And
this joyful expression is carried up the hill, by charming gardens,
orange groves, and vineyards, to the Venetian fort at the top, which, as
we saw it in the brilliant sunshine, with the birds flying about it,
seemed to be throwing its cap into the sky with a huzza.

"O hyacinthine isle! O purple Zante!
Isola d'oro! Fior di Levante!"

sang Poe, borrowing his chimes this time, however, from an Italian
song--"Zante, Zante, fior di Levante!" This flower of the Levant exports
not flowers, but fruit. The currants, which had vaguely presented
themselves at Santa Maura and Cephalonia, came now decisively to the
front. One does not think of these little berrylettes (I am certainly
hunted by "ette") as ponderous. But when one beholds tons of them,
cargoes for ships, one regards them with a new respect. It was probably
the brisk commercial aspect of the currants which made the port look so
modern. All the Ionian Islands except Corfu export currants, but Zante
throws them out to the world with both hands. I must confess that I have
always blindly supposed (when I thought of it at all) that the currant
of the plum-pudding was the same fruit as the currant of our
gardens--that slightly acrid red berry which grows on bushes that follow
the lines of back fences--bushes that have patches of weedy ground under
them where hens congregate. I fancied that by some process unknown to
me, at the hands of persons equally unknown (perhaps those who bring
flattened raisins from grapes), these berries were dried, and that they
then became the well-known ornament of the Christmas-cake. It was at
Zante that my shameful ignorance was made clear to me. Here I learned
that the dried fruit of commerce is a dwarf grape, which has nothing in
common with currant jelly. Its English name, currant, is taken from the
French "raisin de Corinthe," or Corinth grape, a title bestowed because
the fruit was first brought into notice at Corinth. We have stolen this
name in the most unreasonable way for our red berry. Then, to make the
confusion worse, as soon as we have put the genuine currants into our
puddings and cakes, we turn round and call them "plums"! The real
currant, the dwarf grape of Corinth, is about as large as a gooseberry
when ripe, and its color is a deep violet