from
my pockets by Americans; so that I am prevented from making any moral
reflections upon the honesty of the Italians.

There is an immense garden of oranges and lemons at the village of
Massa, through which travelers are shown by a surly fellow, who keeps
watch of his trees, and has a bulldog lurking about for the unwary.
I hate to see a bulldog in a fruit orchard. I have eaten a good many
oranges there, and been astonished at the boughs of immense lemons which
bend the trees to the ground. I took occasion to measure one of the
lemons, called a citron-lemon, and found its circumference to be
twenty-one inches one way by fifteen inches the other,--about as big
as a railway conductor's lantern. These lemons are not so sour as the
fellow who shows them: he is a mercenary dog, and his prices afford me
no clew to the just value of oranges.

I like better to go to a little garden in the village of Meta, under a
sunny precipice of rocks overhung by the ruined convent of Camaldoli. I
turn up a narrow lane, and push open the wooden door in the garden of
a little villa. It is a pretty garden; and, besides the orange and
lemon-trees on the terrace, it has other fruit-trees, and a scent of
many flowers. My friend, the gardener, is sorting oranges from one
basket to another, on a green bank, and evidently selling the fruit to
some women, who are putting it into bags to carry away.

When he sees me approach, there is always the same pantomime. I propose
to take some of the fruit he is sorting. With a knowing air, and an
appearance of great mystery, he raises his left hand, the palm toward
me, as one says hush. Having dispatched his business, he takes an empty
basket, and with another mysterious flourish, desiring me to remain
quiet, he goes to a storehouse in one corner of the garden, and returns
with a load of immense oranges, all soaked with the sun, ripe and
fragrant, and more tempting than lumps of gold. I take one, and ask him
if it is sweet. He shrugs his shoulders, raises his hands, and, with
a sidewise shake of the head, and a look which says, How can you be so
faithless? makes me ashamed of my doubts.

I cut the thick skin, which easily falls apart and discloses the
luscious quarters, plump, juicy, and waiting to melt in the mouth. I
look for a moment at the rich pulp in its soft incasement, and then try
a delicious morsel. I nod. My gardener again shrugs his shoulders, with
a slight smile, as much as to say, It coul