the first of those bottles,
yonder, with the purple seal! Here is that very wine, my friends.
Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste. Had ever wine
such a royal heart? I will tell you how to grow it. Choose first of
all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea. Let it
lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting
mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.
Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the
blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down
below its fertilizing virtue. Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in
hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a
state's ransom. Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos;
dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone
jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left
to stand for the space of one moon. Drop them in, one by one, until
the water scarcely cover the mass. Let stand again for two days, and
then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new
moon. Ah, and yet you may miss! For your maidens must be clean, and
yet fierce as though they trod out the hearts of men, as indeed they
do. A king's daughter should lead them, and they must trample with
innocence, and yet with such fury as the prophet's who said 'their
blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my
raiment: for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my
redeemed is come.' . . ."

My father lifted his glass. "To thee, Emilia, child and queen!"

He drank, and, setting down his glass, rested silent for a while, his
eyes full of a solemn rapture.

"My friends," he went on at length, with lowered voice, "know you
that old song?

"'Methought I walked still to and fro,
And from her company could not go--
But when I waked it was not so:
In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.'

"All that autumn I spent under her father's roof, and--my leave
having been extended--all the winter following. The old Count had
convinced himself by this time that by accepting the crown he would
confer a signal service on Corsica, and had opened a lengthy
correspondence with the two Paolis, whose hesitation to accept this
view at once puzzled and annoyed him. For me, I wished the
correspondence might be prolonged for ever, for meanwhile I lived my
days