The olive harvest is in November or December. Nowhere is the olive more appreciated than in Italy where Minerva is said to have bestowed it, the horse, which was Vulcan's gift, coming only second in usefulness. The picked fruit is made into the finer oil, then the fallen olives are gathered by women and girls, and the occupation is very popular, as what is thus earned helps to provide the winter comforts. Fine oil has a very delicate scarcely perceptible taste and smell, and an Italian condemns the oil by saying "_L'olio si sente_" (One can taste it). Frying is generally done with oil and some vegetables and all fish are cooked with it. "_Ojo e sempre ojo, ma strutto! chi sa che struttaccio sara?_" (Oil is always oil, but who knows what lard may be?) they say. The olive tree not only yields the fuel to feed the oil lamps, but it provides some of the best timber for the fire. Not only is it useful but it is one of the most beautiful things in the Italian country--and its grey-green colour, with the tender sheen on the leaf, is as characteristic of the Italian landscape as the deeper green and lordly shaft of the stone pine, or the blue of the hills. The seasons in Italy are two months ahead of ours in England, the wheat harvest being in June. There is seldom any cold before Christmas, and in fine years the winter may be said to be over after the middle of February. The people who inhabit the Alban and Sabine country are the same Latin _plebs_, except that they no longer serve the world's masters and take their part, if only as spectators, in a great classical civilisation: they have served for centuries a papacy which in habits of thought never belied the heredity of the middle ages. In the general outlines the same people--but more not less barbarous than of yore, because they have been arrested, literally have been brutalised, by a complete absence of that moral and intellectual growth which has been the conquest of the centuries. As in pagan Italy, the people are consulters of oracles, confiders in charms and exorcisms, slaves to the belief in "destiny," a word which is ever on their lips ("_e il destino_" absolves you from taking any action); they are cruel and coarse as the cruel are coarse. The inhabitants of the _castelli romani_ were described by a compatriot as "_pieni di superbia, debiti, e pidocchi_" (full of pride, debts, and lice); and he who ventures to hear mass in the parish church of one of these hill towns must have a bath on his return and discard all the garments he wore. Among the Sabine villages, where in our own time the public sport was the baiting of the poor beasts who were going to the slaughter-house, there are smiling olive-crowned towns whose evil reputation for deeds of blood has made it necessary to change the name of the township more than once. In one of these villages, in the "eighties," a man raised his gun and calmly shot his brother _in the presence of their mother_.