The vintners creep through the vine-rows, clipping, clipping with their clumsy shears, and tossing the fruit into the osier baskets strapped on their backs, while they sing the strange old songs that have been sung at the vintage since the days of Servius Tullius; the women’s white head-coverings and dark blue skirts and scarlet bodices blaze out against the gold and green of the vine-rows, and as they carry their baskets—on their heads, after immemorial custom—to the man waiting on the wagon, they move with smooth, stately steps, like caryatides released from the marble. Towards midday the first wagons are full and go trailing up to the wine press near the house; the “treaders,” the strongest of the young men, have been sitting on the stone bench in the shade, for their work is all before them and they have to keep limbs and garments clean. Now the wagon is drawn close to the vat, and the vintagers, working like demons, toss in a ton or two of grapes till the huge receptacle is piled high above its edges with a mountain of purple fruit. A ladder is set against it and the treader scrambles up, his bared limbs gleaming like copper in the sun, and the next instant he is a young Dionysus, leaping and dancing on that piled sweetness, chanting the song to which his feet keep time, while the rosy froth streams from the opening below into a second vat that ere long becomes a lake of dimpling crimson must, whose heady fragrance floats out intoxicatingly on the October air. Ah, the good days! It would indeed have been a poor heart that could not rejoice in them!