We had a heavy crop of diospyros last autumn, drawn from four trees in the kitchen-garden. These fruits are fat, round, rosy fellows, plump as overgrown tomatoes. The flesh of the ripe diospyros is Nature’s jam, soft and mushy, delicious in flavour, and eaten politely with a spoon. Our neighbour who hails from Cincinnati grew a crop of small, sickly-looking fruit. "Ah!" said Emilio, "now that you see the difference in the two crops, you must believe me. Their diospyros were gathered in the growing moon, and they shrivel and lose colour and flavour; ours were gathered in the waning moon, and keep beautiful and sound to the end of the season." There is good luck under the waning moon. Another explanation of the difference in the crops has merit, which Emilio considers treason to the honourable tradition of his fathers. Our fruit was grown in the kitchen-garden on manured soil; our American neighbour’s trees stand on a rocky bank in the wild garden which is never dressed with manure. The blessing of the moon falls on the crop that is best nourished in the days of its youth. In the garden is an avenue of lime-trees about one hundred and sixty feet long. In the summer it forms a deliciously shady walk; in rainy weather it is a clean and pleasant promenade, for it has a paved pathway in it. The north end of the avenue terminates in a large semicircular stone seat mounted on a stone base one step higher than the pathway. The seat has no florid decorative carving on it to arouse hostility or provoke criticism. It is just a plain seat of simple Roman type, roomy and comfortable to sit on. Behind the seat curves a semicircle of thirteen cypress-trees screening the north winds. Again, behind the cypress-trees is an interesting old stone wall about twenty feet high, forming the boundary of the garden. Above the wall, rising in gentle slope, is the south shoulder of the hill, on the hill-top sits Fiesole, the famous Etruscan city of history and legend. The slope is covered with olives and vines, forming a mantle grey and green with its leafy fringe dropping on our garden wall.