s
for you, always it will add [**Transcriber's Note: undecipherable] to
recompense. In the spring the villa gives you continual delight; green
leaves, flowers, odours, songs and in every way makes you happy and
jocund: all smiles on you and promises a fine harvest, filling you with
good hope, delight, and pleasure. Yes indeed, how courteous is the
villa! She gives you now one fruit, now another, never leaving you
without some of her own joy. For in autumn she pays you for all your
trouble, fruit out of all proportion to your merit, recompense, and
thanks; and how willingly and with what abundance--twelve for one: for a
little sweat, many barrels of wine, and for what is old in the house,
the villa will give you new, seasoned, clear, and good. She fills the
house the winter long with grapes, both fresh and dry, with plums,
walnuts, pears, apples, almonds, filberts, giuggiole, pomegranates, and
other wholesome fruits, and apples fragrant and beautiful. Nor in winter
will she forget to be liberal; she sends you wood, oil, vine branches,
laurels, junipers to keep out snow and wind, and then she comforts you
with the sun, offering you the hare and the roe, and the field to follow
them...." Nor are the joys of summer less, for you may read Greek and
Latin in the shadow of the courtyard where the fountains splash, while
your girls are learning songs and your boys are busy with the contadini,
in the vineyards or beside the stream. It is a spirit of pure delight,
we find there in that old townsman, in country life, simple and quiet,
after the noise and sharpness of the market-place. And certainly, as we
pass from Fiesole down the new road where the tram runs, turning into
the lanes again just by Villa Galetta, on our way to Maiano, we may
fancy we see many places where such a life as that has always been
lived, and, as I know, in some is lived to-day. Everywhere on these
hills you find villas, and every villa has a garden, and every garden
has a fountain, where all day long the sun plays with the slim dancing
water and the contadine sing of love in the vineyards.

Maiano itself is but a group of such places, among them a great villa
painted in the manner of the seventeenth century, spoiled a little by
modernity. You can leave it behind, passing into a lane behind Poggio
Gherardo, where it is roses, roses all the way, for the podere is hedged
with a hedge of roses pink and white, where the iris towers too,
streaming its violet ba