side all the time while attempting to do
so. She would have fallen entirely if her mother had not held her up. At
length she succeeded in getting hold of the cake, which she carried
directly to her mouth, and then laughed again with a laugh that seemed
scarcely human, and was hideous to see.

"Does she understand?" asked Rollo.

"Yes," said the mother; "she understands, but she can't speak, poor
thing. But she is very much obliged to you indeed."

So Rollo bowed to the mother of the child, and to the other women, and
then went on and rejoined his father and mother.

They passed through the village, and then came into the open country
again. Sometimes the mountains that bordered the valley receded to some
distance; at other times they came very near; and there was one place
where they formed a range of lofty precipices a thousand feet high, that
seemed almost to overhang the road. Here Rollo stopped to look up. He
saw, near a rounded mass of rock, half way up the mountain, two young
eagles that had apparently just left their nest, and were trying to
learn to fly. The old eagles were soaring around them, screaming. They
seemed to be afraid that their young ones would fall down the rocks and
get killed. Rollo wished that they would fall down, or at least fly
down, to where he was, in order that he might catch one of them. But
they did not. They took only short flights from rock to rock and from
thicket to thicket, but they did not come down. So, after watching them
for a time, Rollo went on.

Next they came to a place where the valley took a turn so as to expose
the mountain side to the sun in such a manner as to make a good place
there for grapes to grow and ripen. The people had accordingly terraced
the whole declivity by building walls, one above another, to support the
earth for the vineyards; and when Rollo was going by the place he looked
up and saw a man standing on the wall of one of the terraces, with the
tool which he had been working with in his hand. He seemed suspended in
mid air, and looked down on the road and on the people walking along it
as a man would look down upon a street in London from the gallery under
the dome of St. Paul's.

"That's a pleasant place to work," said Rollo, "away up there, between
the heavens and the earth."

"Yes," said his mother; "and I should think that taking care of vines
and gathering the grapes would be very pretty work to do."

There was a little building on the co