for the original four, and not a centesimo more.
That I solemnly say, and am ready to depart. Hesitation and renewed
conference; but at last the proprietor relents; and, with the look of
one who is ruined for life, and who yet is willing to sacrifice
himself, he hands me the oranges. Instantly the excitement is dead,
the crowd disperses, and the street is as quiet as ever; when I walk
away, bearing my hard-won treasures.

A little while after, as I sat upon the outer wall of the terrace of
the Camaldoli, with my feet hanging over, these same oranges were
taken from my pockets by Americans; so that I am prevented from
making any moral reflections upon the honesty of the Italians.

There is an immense garden of oranges and lemons at the village of
Massa, through which travelers are shown by a surly fellow, who keeps
watch of his trees, and has a bulldog lurking about for the unwary.
I hate to see a bulldog in a fruit orchard. I have eaten a good many
oranges there, and been astonished at the boughs of immense lemons
which bend the trees to the ground. I took occasion to measure one
of the lemons, called a citron-lemon, and found its circumference to
be twenty-one inches one way by fifteen inches the other,--about as
big as a railway conductor's lantern. These lemons are not so sour
as the fellow who shows them: he is a mercenary dog, and his prices
afford me no clew to the just value of oranges.

I like better to go to a little garden in the village of Meta, under
a sunny precipice of rocks overhung by the ruined convent of
Camaldoli. I turn up a narrow lane, and push open the wooden door in
the garden of a little villa. It is a pretty garden; and, besides
the orange and lemon-trees on the terrace, it has other fruit-trees,
and a scent of many flowers. My friend, the gardener, is sorting
oranges from one basket to another, on a green bank, and evidently
selling the fruit to some women, who are putting it into bags to
carry away.

When he sees me approach, there is always the same pantomime. I
propose to take some of the fruit he is sorting. With a knowing air,
and an appearance of great mystery, he raises his left hand, the palm
toward me, as one says hush. Having dispatched his business, he
takes an empty basket, and with another mysterious flourish, desiring
me to remain quiet, he goes to a storehouse in one corner of the
garden, and returns with a load of immense oranges, all soaked with
the sun, ripe and fragran