shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the
mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to
skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses
throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in
fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I
should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not
planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass
looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular
succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the
hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of
the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines
showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes very
small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and
wheat-fields in that vast prospect, and certainly there were towns and
villages; but what remains with me is the sense of olives and ever more
olives, though this may be the cumulative effect of other such prospects
as vast and as monotonous.

While we looked away and away, the gardener and a half-grown boy were
about their labors that Sunday afternoon as if it were a week-day,
though for that reason perhaps they were not working very hard. They
seemed mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from the paths, and
where the leaves had not fallen from the horse-chestnuts the boy was
assisting nature by climbing the trees and plucking them. We tried to
find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do not know why he was
doing it, and I must be content to contribute the bare fact to the
science of arboriculture. Possibly it was in the interest of neatness,
and was a precaution against letting the leaves drop and litter the
grass. There was apparently a passion for neatness throughout, which in
the villa itself mounted to ecstasy. It was in a state to be come and