“What?” exclaimed the driver, who had a little French, “You eat those wild things? That is not well; they are only for birds and cattle.” He was much concerned for us, my mother was equally concerned for him. While I stood, as Emerson has it: Caught among the blackberry vines, Feeding on the Ethiops sweet. _she_ tried to persuade him that blackberries were good food for human beings to eat. “This is such a poor country! What a pity they do not know the value of their own fruits!” she exclaimed. After Brittany came Switzerland; of this there remains the awe of the Alps, the chill breath of the Jungfrau, the edelweiss at Chamonix, the bear-pit at Berne. These were surface things, easily recalled; when it comes to memory’s substratum, that’s a different story. My mind is like a vast rubbish heap that covers some buried city; if I dig hard enough I uncover priceless treasures, temples, statues, long colonnades leading to forgotten altars where once the sacred fire burned. My friend Giacomo Boni, who found the tomb of Romulus in the Roman Forum, showed me his method of excavation. The dust of ages was carefully skimmed off in layers. As each stratum represented a different epoch, it was isolated and sifted, and every bit of marble, glass, metal, or brick sorted and fitted together. I have helped him sort his treasures in the little workroom over the Forum, watched his skillful, nervous fingers put together the fragments of an exquisite vase three thousand years old. By a like method I too can find bits of jeweled glass and earthenware: can piece them together; the trouble is in choosing where to dig! Among the spoils of these months of wandering three objects survive, treasured by my mother through all the years; a tiny clay statuette of the goddess Pacht, ravished from an Egyptian tomb, a small Greek terra cotta cup, and some pressed flowers in an envelope marked “Gethsemane.” Out of that shining past that I alone remember, let me snatch something worth preserving of the three countries which these, her little keepsakes, recall,--Egypt, Greece, Palestine! If you look at the map of Egypt you will see something like a lily with a long curving stem, lying at the edge of the Mediterranean. The graceful stem is the river Nile, the cup is the Nile Delta, the lotus of Isis and Osiris.