It Was Very Simple-Hearted, As Such Things Seem Mostly Obliged To Be, But Nature Helped Art Out So Well With A Lovely Abundance Of Leaf And Petal That A Far More Exacting Taste Than Ours Must Have Been Satisfied.

The garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it was worth fifteen pesetas and three hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself when he does it.

I think it was, myself, and I would like to be there now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps, and letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes very small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs.

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