ut otherwise manlike,
toiling side by side with male laborers, in the rudest work of the
fields. These sturdy women (if as such we must recognize them) wore the
high-crowned, broad brimmed hat of Tuscan straw, the customary female
head-apparel; and, as every breeze blew back its breadth of brim, the
sunshine constantly added depth to the brown glow of their cheeks. The
elder sisterhood, however, set off their witch-like ugliness to the
worst advantage with black felt hats, bequeathed them, one would fancy,
by their long-buried husbands.

Another ordinary sight, as sylvan as the above and more agreeable, was
a girl, bearing on her back a huge bundle of green twigs and shrubs,
or grass, intermixed with scarlet poppies and blue flowers; the verdant
burden being sometimes of such size as to hide the bearer's figure, and
seem a self-moving mass of fragrant bloom and verdure. Oftener, however,
the bundle reached only halfway down the back of the rustic nymph,
leaving in sight her well-developed lower limbs, and the crooked knife,
hanging behind her, with which she had been reaping this strange
harvest sheaf. A pre-Raphaelite artist (he, for instance, who painted
so marvellously a wind-swept heap of autumnal leaves) might find an
admirable subject in one of these Tuscan girls, stepping with a free,
erect, and graceful carriage. The miscellaneous herbage and tangled
twigs and blossoms of her bundle, crowning her head (while her ruddy,
comely face looks out between the hanging side festoons like a
larger flower), would give the painter boundless scope for the minute
delineation which he loves.

Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike, there was still a
remote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm, which is scarcely to be found in the
daily toil of other lands. Among the pleasant features of the wayside
were always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy trunks;
they wreathed themselves in huge and rich festoons from one tree to
another, suspending clusters of ripening grapes in the interval between.
Under such careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor, and is
therefore more artificially restrained and trimmed. Nothing can be
more picturesque than an old grapevine, with almost a trunk of its own,
clinging fast around its supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack its
moral. You might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you saw how
the kno