re which
Gerard Douw might well have painted. The great oil jars, the old hearth
and oven, the earthen jugs, hanging lamps with floating wicks, and the
figures of the men moving about, made a picturesque scene. The fruit was
first crushed by stone rollers, the wheel being turned by water-power;
the pulp, saturated with warm water, was then placed in flat, round rope
baskets, which were piled one upon the other, and the whole subjected to
strong pressure, which caused the clear yellow oil to exude through the
meshes of the baskets, and flow down into the little reservoir below.

"Our manners would become charmingly suave if we lived here long," said
Inness. "It would be impossible to resist the influence of so much oil."

The lemon terraces were as unlike the olive groves as a gay love song is
unlike a Gregorian chant. The trees rose brightly and youthfully from
the grassy hill-side steps, each leaf shining as though it was
varnished, and the yellow globes of fruit gleaming like so much
imprisoned sunshine. Here was no shade, no weird grayness, but
everything was either vivid gold or vivid green. Janet said this.

"_I_ am the latter, I think," said Baker, "to be caught here again on
these terraces. I don't know what your experience has been, but for my
part I detest them; I have been lost here again and again. You get into
them and you think it all very easy, and you keep going on and on. You
climb hopefully from one to the next by those narrow sidling little
stone steps, only to find it the exact counterpart of the one you have
left, with still another beyond. And you keep on plunging up and up
until you are worn out. At last you meet a man, and you ask him
something or other beginning with 'Purtorn'--"

"What in the world do you mean?" said Janet, breaking into laughter.

"I am sure I don't know; but that is what you all say."

"Perhaps you mean 'Peut-on,'" suggested Margaret.

"Well, whatever I mean, the man always answers 'Oui,' and so I am no
better off than I was before, but keep plunging on," said Baker,
ruefully.

But the Professor now opened a more instructive subject. "Lemons are the
most important product of Mentone," he began. "As they can be kept
better than those of Naples and Sicily, they command a large price. The
tree flowers all the year through, and the fruit is gathered at four
different periods. The annual production of lemons at Mentone is about
thirty millions."

"Thirty millions of lemon