With borders long the rivers; that earth now
Seems like to heaven, a seat where gods might dwell,
Or wander with delight, and love to haunt
Her sacred shades.”
A snatch from some old Greek chant, with something of plaintiveness in the tone, issues from the thicket just across the mule-path, cut deep in the earth, which reaches from the city gate to the streamlet; and a youth, who had the appearance of the assistant bailiff or procurator of the farm, leaped from it, and went over to the labourers, who were busy with the vines. His eyes and hair and the cast of his features spoke of Europe; his manner had something of shyness and reserve, rather than of rusticity; and he wore a simple red tunic with half sleeves, descending to the knee, and tightened round him by a belt. His legs and feet were protected by boots which came half up his calf. He addressed one of the slaves, and his voice was gentle and cheerful.
“Ah, Sansar!” he cried, “I don’t like your way of managing these branches so well as my own; but it is a difficult thing to move an old fellow like you. You never fasten together the shoots which you don’t cut off, they are flying about quite wild, and the first [pg 8]ox that passes through the field next month for the ploughing will break them off.”
He spoke in Latin; the man understood it, and answered him in the same language, though with deviations from purity of accent and syntax, not without parallel in the talkee-talkee of the West Indian negro.
“Ay, ay, master,” he said, “ay, ay; but it’s all a mistake to use the plough at all. The fork does the work much better, and no fear for the grape. I hide the tendril under the leaf against the sun, which is the only enemy we have to consider.”
“Ah! but the fork does not raise so much dust as the plough and the heavy cattle which draw it,” returned Agellius; “and the said dust does more for the protection of the tendril than the shade of the leaf.”
“But those huge beasts,” retorted the slave, “turn up great ridges, and destroy the yard.”