Yet who could convey to black-and-white speech the sense of beauty which
is the better part of my rambles? It is only to say that here I went up
and down on the open hillsides, and there I followed the ridges or kept
the cliff-line above the fair coves; that now I dropped down into the
vales, under the shade of olive and lemon branches, and wound by the
gushing streams through the orchards. In every excursion I make some
discovery, and bring home some golden store for memory. Yesterday I
found the olive slopes over Letojanni--beautiful old gnarled trees, such
as I have never seen except where the nightingales sing by the eastern
shore of Spezzia. I did not doubt when I was told that those orchards
yield the sweetest oil in the world. It was the lemon harvest, and
everywhere were piles of the pale yellow fruit heaped like apples under
the slender trees, with a gatherer here and there; for this is always a
landscape of solitary figures. To-day I found the little beach of San
Nicolo, not far from the same place. I kept inland, going down the
hollow by the Campo Santo, where there is a cool, gravelly stream in a
dell that is like a nook in the Berkshire hills, and then along the
upland on the skirts of Monte d'Oro, till by a sharp turn seaward I came
out through a marble quarry where men were working with what seemed slow
implements on the gray or party-coloured stone.
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