Jane and Peripatetica could put their heads out of the windows and study history and legend at their ease, the train ambling amiably and not too rapidly through the lovely land, where the near return of Persephone was foreshadowed in the delicate rosy clouds of the Judas trees drifting across the black green of dense carobs. It was foretold, too, by the broad yellow mustard fields blooming under the shadow of silver-grey olive orchards; Fields-of-the-Cloth-of-Gold they were, about which Spring was pitching white tents of plum flowers in which to sign royal alliance with Summer. They saw old Sicilian farm-steadings here and there crowning the rising ground on either hand, freaked and lichened with years, and showing among their spiring cypresses the square towers to which the inhabitants had fled for safety in the old days of Levantine piracy. Many of these houses were very old, six or eight hundred years old, it was said. Orange and lemon groves on either side the way still hung heavy with fruit, plainly feeling it a duty laid upon them to look like the trees in Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes; like the trees of all the Old Masters’ backgrounds. Invariably being round, close clumps of green set thick with golden balls, quite unlike the orange trees in America, which have never had proper decorative and artistic models set for their copying, and therefore grow carelessly and less beautifully. As far as the eye could reach the whole land was furred with the tender green of sprouting corn. For this was once Europe’s granary, and the place of Rome’s 131bread; here Demeter first taught man to sow and reap, and despite Ætna’s fires, despite the destruction and ravaging of a thousand wars, and thousands of years of careless unrestorative use of the soil, corn still grows on this plain, so hard, so perfect, and so nourishing of grain that no Sicilian can afford to eat it, selling his own crop to macaroni manufacturers, and contenting himself with a poorer imported wheat for his dark daily bread. In these rich meadows, too, replacing the frigid little Evangelical-looking goat of Taormina, browsed fat flocks in snowy silken fleeces, and with long wavy horns. Flocks that were tended by shepherds draped in faded blue or brown hooded cloaks, wearing sheep’s wool bound about their cross-gartered legs, their feet shod with hairy goat-skin shoes. They leaned in contemplative attitudes on long staves—as every right-minded shepherd should—so old a picture, so unchanged from far-off, pastoral days! Just so had they shown themselves to Theocritus, when that sweet young singer of the early time had wandered here among the herdsmen, the fishers, and the delvers in the good brown earth, in the days when the Greeks still lived and ruled here, so long and long ago. “I wish they would pipe,” said Peripatetica. “It only needs to complete the picture that innocent sweet trilling of the shepherd’s reed that is like the voices of the birds and of the cicalas.”