sad-coloured dress of the people. Yet she came out while we rode a
good mile off, and waited for us as we climbed the last slope, and
she was his only child.

"How shall I tell you of her? She helped my purpose nothing, for at
first she was vehemently opposed to her father's consenting to be
king. Her politics she derived in part from the reading of
Plutarch's Lives and in part from her own simplicity. They were
childish, utterly: yet they put me to shame, for they glowed with the
purest love of her country. She has walked on fiery ploughshares
since then; she has trodden the furnace, and her beautiful bare feet
are seared since they trod the cool vintage with me on the slopes
above the Taravo. . . . Priske, open the first of those bottles,
yonder, with the purple seal! Here is that very wine, my friends.
Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste. Had ever wine
such a royal heart? I will tell you how to grow it. Choose first of
all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea. Let it
lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting
mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.
Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the
blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down
below its fertilizing virtue. Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in
hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a
state's ransom. Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos;
dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone
jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left
to stand for the space of one moon. Drop them in, one by one, until
the water scarcely cover the mass. Let stand again for two days, and
then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new
moon. Ah, and yet you may miss! For your maidens must be clean, and