The Green Leaf was dancing forward to the field now, her hands on her hips, setting the other younger girls saucily swaying with her, to a dialect lilt of:
“In capo del monte,
In capo del monte,
Si fà l’amore
Fiorentina! Fiorentina!
E cip i tè ciop!
E cip i tè ciop!”
“E chippety chop! Chippety chop!” Olive laughingly echoed the last two lines as the little singer pronounced them. “I know what that song means,” she cried; “it’s about a lover going up a mountain to see his lady-love whose name is ‘Fiorentina’--Florence--and the ‘Chippety chop!’ is their airy chatter. Oh! I’m so glad”--she waved her garden rake--“that the suggestion came from Headquarters that each Camp Fire Group should adopt a foreign-born sister. Listening to Flamina, nobody can think that the benefit will be all on her side; we’re getting some magic from her that breathes in that wonderful voice of hers, which, as you say, would soften a----”
“A corky carrot, eh?” sniffed Sesooā, her spirits dropping with a squawk from airy realms of love and song, to the skirts of the war-garden on Night-Heron Hill. “Well! Here’s such a passé vegetable row, a left-over from the crop which the farmer--Captain Andy’s enterprising nephew--planted himself early in the spring. Our late carrot-crop that we put in towards the end of June doesn’t need any sorcery of Flamina’s--or anybody else’s”--laughingly; “it’s a winner,” looking along green, feathery rows stirred by the sea-breeze, with here and there a terra-cotta rim just peeping above ground.
“And nobody appreciates its being a ‘corker’--not corky--any more than I do, except when one has to go to work to thin it out, as some of us will have to do this morning.... And to tell the truth,” Sara’s gold-tipped eyelashes twinkled, “I never felt less like work than I do to-day.”