nothing, and
straggling for nothing: they carried a broad furrow or wheal all across
the country, black and loathsome, while it was as green and smiling on
each side of them and in front, as it had been before they came. Before
them, in the language of prophets, was a paradise; and behind them a
desert. They are daunted by nothing; they surmount walls and hedges, and
enter enclosed gardens or inhabited houses. A rare and experimental
vineyard has been planted in a sheltered grove. The high winds of Africa
will not commonly allow the light trellis or the slim pole; but here the
lofty poplar of Campania has been possible, on which the vine plant mounts
so many yards into the air, that the poor grape-gatherers bargain for a
funeral pile and a tomb as one of the conditions of their engagement. The
locusts have done what the winds and lightning could not do, and the whole
promise of the vintage, leaves and all, is gone, and the slender stems are
left bare. There is another yard, less uncommon, but still tended with
more than common care; each plant is kept within due bounds by a circular
trench round it, and by upright canes on which it is to trail; in an hour
the solicitude and long toil of the vine-dresser are lost, and his pride
humbled. There is a smiling farm; another sort of vine, of remarkable
character, is found against the farm-house. This vine springs from one
root, and has clothed and matted with its many branches the four walls;
the whole of it is covered thick with long clusters, which another month
will ripen:--on every grape and leaf there is a locust. Into the dry caves
and pits, carefully strewed with straw, the harvest-men have (safely, as
they thought just now) been lodging the far-famed African wheat. One grain
or root shoots up into ten, twenty, fifty, eighty, nay, three or four
hundred stalks: sometimes the stalks have two ears apiece, and these again
shoot into a number of lesser ones. These stores are intended for the
Roman populace, but the locusts have been beforehand with them. The small
patches of ground belonging to the poor peasants up and down the country,
for raising the turnips, garlic, barley, watermelons, on which they live,
are the prey of these glutton invaders as much as the choicest vines and
olives. Nor have they any reverence for the villa of the civic decurion or
the Roman official. The neatly arranged kitchen-garden, with its cherries,
plums, peaches, and apricots, is a waste; as the s