Very different is the anemone of Villa Doria, far away across the city, on the Janiculum. It too nestles beneath the stone-pines, in the fine short grass, but it is a patrician bloom, each flower perfect, with broad polished petals of pure ivory or vivid scarlet or monsignore purple, diverging from a heart as black as jet. It is chary of growth and keeps close to the ground, and you must tread delicately or you will crush some yet unopened buds. It meant a good deal to some of us—I wonder if the others remember? One did. Far away in China, just before my eldest boy was born, there blew to me across the world a film of Honiton lace, and when I spread it out, there was a garland of Villa Doria anemones worked in the red West Country that is the Italy of England, and sent as a greeting by a comrade of the vanished Roman days. Why don’t we all die when we are young and sweet and true? But to return—(for the —th time?)—to my very much strayed sheep—the old October entertainments in the Villa Borghese. Those who have not lived in them would find it hard to understand what that month means to the children of the grape countries. It is the very crown of the year in Romagna, indeed all over Italy. The heats of summer, the stifling languors of scirocco, are over and gone; the air is divinely cool and bright, and everything sparkles in a sun that warms but no longer scorches; the wind comes dancing over the mountains, like a song, rustling the trees and shaking little showers of bronzed leaves down on one’s head. In the vineyards the vines were stripped of most of their leaves in August to let the grapes bake in the sun till their hearts are like syrup in the black tight-drawn skins. Now, if the year is a good one, the rain came after the Feast of the Assumption to soften and swell the purple covering to all but bursting point, and the few leaves that hang on the vines have turned scarlet and yellow, so that they look like huge gaudy butterflies hovering round the long pear-shaped clusters of fruit. The strong wilful “ceps” is like fretted gold in the sunshine; every bunch that is brought to one’s table must be of perfect shape and have two or three inches of that corrugated stem to carry it by and two leaves at its head for wings; but by the first day of October the mere cutting for market is over, and the real business of the vintage begins, when the great wains go lumbering down the alleys of the vineyard, drawn by meek white oxen who move slowly but plunge into the rich loose soil up to the fetlock at every step.