From The Fate
Which Nearly Overtook Me He Might Save Himself By Specialising; By
Dividing The Many Local Varieties Into
Two main classes and devoting his
whole attention to one or the other; to the kind such as I found
On
Elba - small and round and fragrant, of ruddy hue, and palpitating with
warm sunbeams; or to that other kind, those that grow in clearings of
the Apennines where the boughs droop to earth with the weight of their
portentous clusters - swarthy as night, huge in size, oval, and fraught
with chilly mountain dews.
No true enthusiast, I feel sure, would ever be satisfied with such an
unfair division of labour - so one-sided an arrangement. He would curse
his folly for having specialised. While engaged upon one variety, he
would always be hankering after that other kind and thinking how much
better they were. What shall he do, then? Well, he might devote one year
to one species, the next to another, and so on. Or else - seeing that
every zone of altitude bears brambles at its season and that the
interval between the maturing of the extreme varieties is at least four
months - he might pilgrimage athwart the country in a vertical sense,
devouring blackberries of different flavour as he went along; he might
work his way upwards, boring a tunnel through the landscape as a beetle
drills an oak, and leaving a track of devastation in his rear - browsing
aloft from the sea-board, where brambles are black in June, through
tangled macchia and vine-clad slopes into the cooler acclivities of rock
and jungle - grazing ever upward to where, at close of September and in
the shadow of some lonely peak on which the white mantle of winter has
already fallen, he finds a few more berries struggling for warmth and
sunshine, and then, still higher up, just a few more - the last, the very
last, of their race - dwarfs of the mountains, earthward-creeping, and
frozen pink ere yet they have had time to ripen. Here, crammed to the
brim, he may retire to hibernate, curled up like a full-gorged bear and
ready to roll downhill with the melting snows and arrive at the
sea-coast in time to begin again. What a jolly life! How much better
than being Postmaster-General or Inspector of Nuisances! But such
enthusiasts are nowhere to be found. I wish they were; the world would
be a merrier place....
Here is the ruined town of Ferento, all alone on the arid brow of the
hill. Nothing human in sight. A charming spot it must have been in olden
times, when the country was more timbered; now all is bare - brown earth,
brown stones. Dutifully I inspect the ruins and, applying the method of
Zadig or something of that kind, conclude that Ferento, this particular
Ferento, was relatively unimportant and relatively modern, although so
fine a site may well have commended itself from early days as a
settlement. I pick up, namely, a piece of verde antico, a green marble
which came into vogue at a later period than many other coloured ones.
Ergo, Ferento was relatively modern as antiquities go; else this marble
would not occur there.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 141 of 151
Words from 72023 to 72561
of 77809
