"This is like a moving picture," Edith said to Rafael, when at last
their basket was filled and they had climbed into the ox-cart to ride
with the overflowing baskets and grape-stained children to the
farm-house.

As they passed under the vines, Edith cut off some of the trailing
ends and made crowns for the bareheaded, black-haired peasant girls,
and one of them, more daring than the others, crowned Edith's own
black hair.

Mrs. Sprague had already found her way to the house, and to the heart
of the farmer's wife, by admiring the little baby that lay sleeping in
its cradle under a fig tree near-by.

The baby was wrapped in a swaddling band, a piece of linen four or
five yards long, which is wound round and round the tiny body,
beginning just under the arms and ending at the toes. It is a curious
fashion the Italians have of dressing their babies, and has been
followed ever since the Mother Mary wrapped the infant Jesus in a
swaddling band, so many hundred years ago.

"Pretty bambino," Mrs. Sprague had said, pointing to the baby, and the
mother had found a hundred things to say in reply, in her voluble
Italian fashion, not one word of which Mrs. Sprague could understand.

The farmer's wife was still talking when the vintage procession swung
into the yard, the boys and girls lifting their voices in a festival
song and keeping time to the swinging of the horns of the great white
oxen.

Then there was the merry confusion of emptying the grapes into the
huge vats, and the choosing of certain men and maidens to trample out
the purple juice.

Two or three always stand together in a single vat and press the
grapes with their bare feet, thus forcing out the juice, which runs
through an opening in the base of the vat into a wooden bucket.

Some of the farmers use a machine to press the grapes, but many think
it should be done, as it was in old Bible times, with the human foot.
It seems that the feet know how to avoid crushing the seeds and the
skins, as a machine cannot know.

Rafael asked to be allowed to press the grapes in one of the vats, and
after permission had been given him, Edith suddenly asked to do it
also.

The farmer shook his head doubtfully. "It is very hard work," he
objected.

Edith bade Rafael say that she was an American girl, and not afraid of
hard work, and at last she was permitted to stand with the Italian boy
in the vat and tread until she grew tired.

However, to stand in the midst of j