He answered that the grapes grew so thickly that it was necessary to pick off the leaves in order that the fruit might get the full benefit of the sun. "There is much to do for the grapes before they can be picked," he added. "We must see to it that neither hail nor wind spoils the clusters before the vintage."
Then he explained that the grapes would soon be taken to the house and poured into great vats, where they would be made into wine.
Before Edith could ask about this process, Rafael shouted, "The oxen! Here come the oxen!" and she turned to see the gaily decorated, white oxen moving slowly across the field, drawing a big wagon.
The driver led the oxen to the farther end of the vineyard, and the boys and girls climbed upon the wagon with their baskets, and were carried under the festoons of vines, picking clusters of grapes here and there as they rode slowly along.
"I should like to help pick the grapes," said Edith wistfully, as she watched the merry pickers at their task.
Rafael asked one of the men if she might be allowed to do so. He smiled and nodded, pointing to an empty basket on the ground, and soon the two children were filling it together, and laughing and shouting with the others.
"This is like a moving picture," Edith said to Rafael, when at last their basket was filled and they had climbed into the ox-cart to ride with the overflowing baskets and grape-stained children to the farm-house.
As they passed under the vines, Edith cut off some of the trailing ends and made crowns for the bareheaded, black-haired peasant girls, and one of them, more daring than the others, crowned Edith's own black hair.
Mrs. Sprague had already found her way to the house, and to the heart of the farmer's wife, by admiring the little baby that lay sleeping in its cradle under a fig tree near-by.
The baby was wrapped in a swaddling band, a piece of linen four or five yards long, which is wound round and round the tiny body, beginning just under the arms and ending at the toes. It is a curious fashion the Italians have of dressing their babies, and has been followed ever since the Mother Mary wrapped the infant Jesus in a swaddling band, so many hundred years ago.