An exquisite form of orcharding, this, as delicate and perfect as a hot-house, with every inch of the soil utilized for the vegetables set about the trees’ roots, and the trees themselves growing in unbelievable numbers to the acre. For not one superfluous leaf or branch was there—just the requisite number to carry and nourish the greatest possible quantity of fruit. In consequence of which the whole land was as if touched by some vegetable Midas and turned all to gold. Millions and millions of the yellow globes hung still unpicked, though already the trees were swelling the buds which within ten days were to break forth into a far-flung bridal wreath, and intoxicate all the land with honeyed perfumes. 232And, mark you, how nations are influenced by their trees! In the bad old days of constant war and turmoil the isolated family was never secure, and the people clung to the towns, but modern careful culture of the orange has forced orchardists to live close by their charges, and the population is being slowly pushed back into rural life, with the result of better health, better morals, and a great decrease of homicides. One has really no convenient time for sticking knives into one’s friends when one is showing lemon-trees how to earn $400 an acre and orange-trees half as much.... “It is the most beautiful town in the whole world,” said Peripatetica in that tiresomely dogmatic way she has of expressing the most obvious fact. They had wandered out of their hotel, and through a pair of stately iron gates crowned with armorial beasts. Beyond the gates lay a garden. But a garden! Acres of garden, laced by sweeping avenues, shadowed by cypress and stone pines, by ilex and laurel. From the avenues dipped paths which wound through boscoes, looped under bridges veiled with curtains of wisteria and yellow banksias, climbed again to pass through pleached walks; paths that tied themselves about shadowy pools where swans floated in the gloom of palm groves, or debouched across emerald lawns where clumps of forget-me-nots and cinerarias made splashes of bold colour in the grass. “They do these things so well in Europe,” remarked Peripatetica approvingly, as a splendid functionary, in a long blue coat and carrying a silver-headed staff, lifted his cockaded hat to them as they entered the gates. “Now where at home would one find one of our park guardians with such a manner, and looking 233so like a nobleman’s servant? This,” she went on, in an instructive tone, being newly arisen from a guide-book, “is the Giardino Inglese; one of the public parks, and it has exactly the air of loved and carefully tended private possession.”