“They don’t look as if I should wish to eat two dozen,” Bianca remarked doubtfully. “They look to me like little bits of green apples.”
“Please to defer your judgment,” remarked her friend; “and what you do not wish to eat I will take.”
When they had reached home and were seated at the breakfast-table, the Signora took one of the little figs, with some ceremony and much anticipated triumph, and, lacking a fruit-knife, peeled its green skin off with the handle of a tea-spoon. All their eyes were watching the process; and when it was ended, and she pushed out the little teaspoonful of delicious fruit for Mr. Vane to have the first, the others were convinced by only seeing. It was a rich, deep red, of the consistency of solid old preserved strawberries, but with the fig flavor.
After breakfast was over they went out to visit the gardens of the Cesarini palace, for which they had a permit. These are laid out and kept by a Swiss gardener, and are a wilderness of flowers and trees and fountains on the level and down the hill-side. After wandering about the upper part for a while they descended a slowly-winding path, bordered by hydrangeas in full flower, that stood shoulder-high and dropped their great balls of amethyst bloom toward the earth, and came out into a little terrace where the trees and shrubs left an open front. A long bench at the back, and a richly-carved antique capital of a column near the wild-vine parapet, gave them seats, and before them was the whole verdant amphitheatre, with Lake Nemi at the bottom, and the town of Nemi half up the opposite bank, like a little white flower painted half way up the inside of a green cup. And down from the flower, like its white stem, dropped a white stream, cascade after cascade, to the lake, its motion petrified in the distance.
Tall white cloud-shapes marched round the hill-tops and looked over—shining shapes that seemed to hold Olympian deities within their folds, “impenetrable to every ray but that of fancy.” The amphitheatre sloped steeply in a green cone rich with orchards and vineyards, and pressed in a waving line around the water. Opposite the little terrace in which they sat, as in a box at the opera, the shore made a green heart in the water, and from behind one curve of it a boat, tiny in the distance as a black swan, slipped out and moved across the view. The lake lay like an emerald half-fused, its shaded greens touched in places with a soft purple bloom or a silvery lustre, and catching now and then a melting image of some cloud-cap higher than the rest. There was a sound of mellow thunder from some direction—Jupiter Tonans driving through those driving clouds.
They sat there silently drinking in the beauty of the scene, speaking only a word or two now and then, waiting till it should be noon and they should hear the Angelus from Nemi. When it came, a dream of a sound, touching with the outermost wave of its song the party of strangers across the lake, they stood up and said the prayers together. Then, bidding adieu to Nemi and its lake and the beautiful garden, they went slowly away.
That afternoon they went back to Albano, and the next evening returned to Rome. They had only one other excursion to make—that to Monte Cassino. Certain affairs were calling Mr. Vane to America, either for a longer or shorter stay, to go with only his daughters, or to have a nearer companion yet, and the end of their visit was approaching. It would soon be September, and in October they must start. Besides, it was found that, subject to her father’s approval, Bianca had promised to marry early in the spring, and some preparations must be made for the wedding.
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.
TO POPE PIUS IX.
A JUBILEE OFFERING, JUNE 3, 1877.
I.