Up the long smooth road that lay by the walls of the villa came toiling a team of huge grayish oxen, with monstrous spreading horns tied with blue ribbons. The cart that they drew was filled with baskets loaded with grapes, and a whiff of their fragrance smote Daphne's nostrils as she walked on the balcony in the morning air. "Assunta, Assunta!" she cried, leaning over the gray, moss-coated railing, "what is it?" Assunta was squatting on the ground in the garden below, digging with a blunt knife at the roots of a garden fern. There was a gray red cotton shawl over her head, and a lilac apron upon her knees. "It's the vintage, Signorina," she answered, "the wine makes itself." "Everything does itself in this most lazy country," remarked Daphne. "Dresses make themselves, boots repair themselves, food eats itself. There's just one idiom, si fa,"-- "What?" asked Assunta. "Reflections," answered the girl, smiling down on her. "Assunta, may I go and help pick grapes?" "Ma che!" screamed the peasant woman, losing her balance in her sudden emotion and going down on her knees in the loosened soil. "The Signorina, the sister of the Contessa, go to pick grapes in the vineyard?" "Si'" answered Daphne amiably. Her face was alive with laughter. "But the Contessa would die of shame!" asserted Assunta, rising with bits of dirt clinging to her apron, and gesticulating with the knife. "It would be a scandal, and all the pickers would say, 'Behold the mad English-Woman!'" She looked up beseechingly at her mistress. She and Giacomo never could tell beforehand which sentences the Signorina was going to understand. "Come with me!" coaxed the girl. "But does the Signorina want to"-- "I want everything!" Daphne interrupted. "Grapes and flowers and wine and air and sunshine. I want to see and feel and taste and touch and smell everything there is. The days are too short to take it all in. Hurry!" As most of this outburst was in English, Assunta could do nothing but look up with an air of deepened reproach. Daphne disappeared from the railing, and a minute later was at Assunta's side. "Come, come, come!" she cried, pulling her by the lilac apron. "Our time is brief, and we must gather rosebuds while we may. I am young and you are old, and neither of us has any time to lose." Before she knew it, Assunta was trotting meekly down the road at the young lady's heels, carrying a great flat basket for the Signorina's use in picking grapes. They were bound for the lower slopes; the grapes ripened earlier there, the peasant woman explained, and the frosts came later. The loaded wagons that they met were going to Arata, a wine press in the valley beyond this nearest hill. Perhaps the Signorina would like to go there to see the new wine foaming in the vat? Strangers often went to see this.