dusty road. Presently we turned up byways, over which the prickly-pear
and red valerian broke in profuse and unprecise beauty--fleshy-leaved
creepers, too, as of a house-leek turned passion-flower, over-crowned
all with scarlet blotches of cunningly placed colour.

We wandered into woodland paths and across fields. A peasant or small
farmer ran out to stay us. Something was forbidden, it appeared. We were
trampling his artichokes or other precious crop. We understood him not
over well, nor indeed tried to. But a touchingly insignificant piece of
silver induced him to think more kindly of our error, and he showed us a
sweet path, by the side of which a brook tinkled down from the cliffs
above. It led us into another scene--and, I am of opinion, upon another
man's property. For at the door of a low, square-roofed house stood a
man with his hands clasped behind him. He frowned, for he had seen his
neighbour of the itching palm lead us to his gate and there leave us.
And of the silver that lay within that palm he had not partaken.

The sun was broad and high. Here were flats of hay, greyish-green, blue
in parts--but with none of that moist and emerald velvet which would
have flashed upon the burnside meadows at home. Again by the water we
brushed against the asters, which had no business to be growing here in
the spring. Among the young wheat the poppies were flaming--red-coat
officers of the Sower of Tares, with flaunting feather leading on to the
inquisition of fires, when the reapers edge their keen sickles and
fall-to, and the tares are separated from the wheat.

For pence judiciously tendered, we had the young Pan himself for
leader--an Italian boy of sixteen, fair as a god of Greece. He went
before with the most innocent grace in the world, and looked at us over
his shoulder. He called his sister to come also, and as a stimulant he