hour shall be spent!" he said, as he stood on his own ground and
looked through the olive-trees to the river, running swiftly and
strong beneath the moon.

"Those are good words, my son," said Clelia Alba, and her hands
rested on his bowed head.

He adored both the soil and the water of this place of his birth; no
toil upon either seemed to him hard or mean. All which seemed to him
to matter much in the life of a man was to be free, and he was so. In
that little kingdom of fertile soil and running stream no man could
bid him come and go, no law ruled his uprising and his down lying; he
had enough for his own wants and the wants of those about him, enough
for the needs of the body, and the mind here had not many needs; at
the Terra Vergine he was his own master, except so far as he
cheerfully deferred to his mother; and all which he put into the
earth he could take out of it for his own usage, though indeed the
fiscal authorities claimed well nigh one-half, rating his land at far
more than its worth. No doubt scientific agriculture might have made
it yield more than he did; but he was content to follow the ways of
old; he farmed as men did when the Sun-god was the farm slave of
Admetus. The hellebore and the violets grew at will in his furrows;
the clematis and the ivy climbed his figtrees; the fritillaria and
daphne grew in his pastures, and he never disturbed them, or scared
the starling and the magpie which fluttered in the wake of his wooden
plough. The land was good land, and gave him whatever he wanted; he
grudged nothing off it to bird, or beast, or leaf, or flower, or to
the hungry wayfarer who chanced to pass by his doors. In remote
places the old liberal, frank, open-handed hospitality of an earlier
time is still in Italy a practice as well as a tradition.