After a little while, however, Il Rosso, feeling himself sufficiently well primed, came to the head of the table. Silence was proclaimed, and he sung a _stornello_ in honour of the bride and bridegroom, wishing them the usual good things of this life; children to help them with their work, and plenty to eat and drink. He was followed by a little excitable woman with a strident voice, much admired by her audience, who had already sung once at the bride’s house during the _rinfresco_. Her one form of dramatic action consisted in thumping the table with her closed fist. Dinner being over, a few of the favoured guests were invited into the parlour to take coffee—coffee with rum in it, that is; black coffee alone is not approved of. The rest lounged about the fields and chestnut woods for a time, but by about five most of them were on their way home. They all came and shook hands most heartily as they went away, with a:—“Do come and see me”; for they are most hospitable people, and would beg you to share their last crust of bread with them. “_Vuol favorire_” is the phrase you hear from child or grandmother, if you happen to drop in on them while they are eating. The guests, having cows and heifers to be seen to before nightfall, set out home through the cool of the chestnut woods; and we, with our donkey and its poetical driver, quietly dropped down the rock-paved road, past the acacia hedges to the village below. The beauty of rock, forest, and torrent had passed into our souls, and I thought wonderingly of the strange mixture of the idyllic and the realistic in the scenes of which this nature had been the setting; of the frankness mingled with reserve, open-heartedness with shrewdness, hospitality with a tendency to critical carping that form the characteristics of this most attractive peasant population.[5] OLIVE-OIL MAKING NEAR FLORENCE THE sky, “stripped to its depths by the awakening North,” is of that peculiarly limpid clearness which only the _tramontana_ brings with it; the sun’s rays, penetrating with their full force through the pure, dry atmosphere, are as warm and genial as those of Eastertide. Yet it is mid-winter, and we are going to witness a thoroughly winter occupation; the making of the olive-oil in a villa at a little distance out of Florence. Leaving the tram at the foot of the hill, we climb for about three-quarters of an hour through vineyards in which the fresh green of the springing wheat contrasts hopefully with the knotted, bare vine branches. The slopes around us are clothed with olives, whose grey-green is thrown into relief by the austere rows of cypresses in the distance, and the spreading tops of the pine-trees on the further hills.