n her mind when her feet were bare, she
had donned a pair of white stockings and low slippers, and over her
thick, dark hair was tied a handkerchief gay with a pattern of brilliant
yellow flowers on a white ground. This was a present from Gaspare bought
at the town of Cattaro at the foot of the mountains, and worn now for the
first time in honor of a great occasion.

To-day Lucrezia was in the service of distinguished forestieri, and she
was gazing now across the ravine straining her eyes to see a procession
winding up from the sea: donkeys laden with luggage, and her new padrone
and padrona pioneered by the radiant Gaspare towards their mountain home.
It was a good day for their arrival. Nobody could deny that. Even
Lucrezia, who was accustomed to fine weather, having lived all her life
in Sicily, was struck to a certain blinking admiration as she stepped out
on to the terrace, and murmured to herself and a cat which was basking
on the stone seat that faced the cottage between broken columns, round
which roses twined:

"Che tempo fa oggi! Santa Madonna, che bel tempo!"

On this morning of February the clearness of the atmosphere was in truth
almost African. Under the cloudless sky every detail of the great view
from the terrace stood out with a magical distinctness. The lines of the
mountains were sharply defined against the profound blue. The forms of
the gray rocks scattered upon their slopes, of the peasants' houses, of
the olive and oak trees which grew thickly on the left flank of Monte
Amato below the priest's house, showed themselves in the sunshine with
the bold frankness which is part of the glory of all things in the south.
The figures of stationary or moving goatherds and laborers, watching
their flocks or toiling among the vineyards and the orchards, were
relieved against the face of nature in the shimmer of the glad gold in
this Eden, with a mingling of delicacy and significance which had in it
something ethereal and mysterious, a hint of fairy-land. Far off, rising
calmly in an immense slope, a slope that was classical in its dignity,
profound in its sobriety, remote, yet neither cold nor sad, Etna soared
towards the heaven, sending from its summit, on which the snows still
lingered, a steady plume of ivory smoke. In the nearer foreground, upon a
jagged crest of beetling rock, the ruins of a Saracenic castle dominated
a huddled village, whose houses seemed to cling frantically to the cliff,
as if each o