"Pretty bambino," Mrs. Sprague had said, pointing to the baby, and the mother had found a hundred things to say in reply, in her voluble Italian fashion, not one word of which Mrs. Sprague could understand.
The farmer's wife was still talking when the vintage procession swung into the yard, the boys and girls lifting their voices in a festival song and keeping time to the swinging of the horns of the great white oxen.
Then there was the merry confusion of emptying the grapes into the huge vats, and the choosing of certain men and maidens to trample out the purple juice.
Two or three always stand together in a single vat and press the grapes with their bare feet, thus forcing out the juice, which runs through an opening in the base of the vat into a wooden bucket.
Some of the farmers use a machine to press the grapes, but many think it should be done, as it was in old Bible times, with the human foot. It seems that the feet know how to avoid crushing the seeds and the skins, as a machine cannot know.
Rafael asked to be allowed to press the grapes in one of the vats, and after permission had been given him, Edith suddenly asked to do it also.
The farmer shook his head doubtfully. "It is very hard work," he objected.
Edith bade Rafael say that she was an American girl, and not afraid of hard work, and at last she was permitted to stand with the Italian boy in the vat and tread until she grew tired.
However, to stand in the midst of juicy grapes means to spoil one's clothes, so the farmer's wife took Edith and Rafael into the house and dressed them like peasant children.
There was much laughing and shouting from the other boys and girls over the sight of the two strange wine-treaders, and it reminded Edith of something. "Doesn't the Bible speak of the singing and laughing that go with the vintage?" she asked her mother.