tender youth
of the spring that is not yet quite gone.

Then, too, the gilliflowers are out, and on Saint John's Eve before
Vespers the Canons used to bless thousands upon thousands of them, tied
up in neat bunches, in small flat baskets, and the poor of Rome came to
the door of the sacristy on the south side and received them to take
home to their sick and infirm, with the blessing of Saint John and a
reviving breath of blossoming nature. But on that day many tents and
booths of boughs were also set up on the broad green that stretched
away to the hedges of vineyards and vegetable gardens, where modern
houses now are built. In each booth there was a little kitchen, a mere
earthen fire-pot, such as the alchemists used of old, but larger, and
there were tables made of boards laid on trestles with rude benches for
seats, and there were little ten-gallon barrels of wine still
unbroached, and piles of loaves covered with clean white cloths, and
there was much green lettuce for salad, floating in tubs full of water,
and there were also fresh onions without end, with their long stalks and
big bunches of tiny flowers. For on the Eve of Saint John the Baptist
all fairies good and bad, and goblins that are black or grey, and the
white hobgoblins too, and the shadowy, unearthly lemures, have deadly
power; and ghosts and wraiths go wailing through lonely church-yards,
and the fountain sprites float on the water and laugh in the pale
moonlight; the misshapen things of evil that haunt murderers' graves
move strangely in the gloom; and though the air be still, the chains
that dangle from old gibbets all clank together wildly when the
blood-spectres hang upon them with wan hands and swing themselves to and
fro; then the banshee shrieks amongst the ancient elms, and deep down in
the crypt of far San Sisto, by the Latin Gate, the Shining Corpse rises
from his grave against the south wall and glares horribly all night at
his fellow-dead. No wonder that against such terrors the Roman people
thought it wise to eat snails fried in oil, and to carry onions in
blossom in their hands, and especially to fortify their quailing
spirits with many draughts of strong wine from Genzano, and Frascati,
and Marino, till the grey dawn forelightened above the Samnite hills,
and a decent man might go home to sleep safely by daylight, and be waked
only by the bells that rang out for high mass at ten o'clock.

So in the late afternoon all those excellent p