entirely satisfactory to him,--we set forward. If anything can bring
back youth, it is a day of certain sunshine and a bit of unexplored
country ahead, with a whole day in which to wander in it without a care
or a responsibility. We walk briskly up the walled road of the piano,
striking at the overhanging golden fruit with our staves; greeting the
orange-girls who come down the side lanes; chaffing with the drivers,
the beggars, the old women who sit in the sun; looking into the open
doors of houses and shops upon women weaving, boys and girls slicing up
heaps of oranges, upon the makers of macaroni, the sellers of sour wine,
the merry shoemakers, whose little dens are centers of gossip here, as
in all the East: the whole life of these people is open and social; to
be on the street is to be at home.

We wind up the steep hill behind Meta, every foot of which is terraced
for olive-trees, getting, at length, views over the wayside wall of the
plain and bay and rising into the purer air and the scent of flowers and
other signs of coming spring, to the little village of Arola, with its
church and bell, its beggars and idlers,--just a little street of houses
jammed in between the hills of Camaldoli and Pergola, both of which we
know well.

Upon the cliff by Pergola is a stone house, in front of which I like
to lie, looking straight down a thousand or two feet upon the roofs of
Meta, the map of the plain, and the always fascinating bay. I went down
the backbone of the limestone ridge towards the sea the other afternoon,
before sunset, and unexpectedly came upon a group of little stone
cottages on a ledge, which are quite hidden from below. The inhabitants
were as much surprised to see a foreigner break through their seclusion
as I was to come upon them. However, they soon recovered presence of
mind to ask for a little money. Half a dozen old hags with the parchment
also sat upon the rocks in the sun, spinning from distaffs, exactly as
their ancestors did in Greece two thousand years ago, I doubt not. I
do not know that it is true, as Tasso wrote, that this climate is so
temperate and serene that one almost becomes immortal in it. Since two
thousand years all these coasts have changed more or less, risen and
sunk, and the temples and palaces of two civilizations have tumbled
into the sea. Yet I do not know but these tranquil old women have been
sitting here on the rocks all the while, high above change and worry and
decay,