evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh, young, confident, and gracious womanhood.

"Hello!" said John to himself. "Who is there in this part of the world with a voice like that?"

And he felt it would not be surprising if on glancing round he should behold—as, in fact, he did—the stranger of yesterday, the Unknown of the garden.

II

She stood on one of the higher terraces, (a very charming picture indeed, bright and erect, in the warm shadow of the olives), and was calling down to a couple of peasants at work on the other side of the stream. Between the thumb and forefinger of an ungloved fair right hand, she held up a silver lira.

Anemones, said she! Near to where the men were working, by the river's brink, there was a space of level ground, perhaps a hundred feet long, and tapering from half that breadth to a point. And this was simply crimson and purple with a countless host of anemones.

She called to the men, and one seeing and hearing her would have thought they must abandon everything, and spring to do her bidding. But they didn't. Pausing only long enough to give her a phlegmatic stare, as if in doubt whether conceivably she could have the impertinence to be addressing them, and vouchsafing not a word, each went calmly on with his employment;—very, very calmly, piano, piano, gently, languidly, filling small baskets with fallen olives, and emptying them upon outspread canvas sheets. There are, and more's the pity, two types of Italian peasant. There's the old type, which we knew in our youth, and happily it still survives in some numbers,—the peasant who, for all his rags and tatters, has manners that will often put one's own to shame, and, with a simpatia like second-sight, is before one's wishes, in his eagerness to serve and please. And there is the new type, which we know to our disgust, and unhappily it multiplies like vermin,—the peasant who has lent his ear to the social democrat, and, his heart envenomed by class hatred, meets your civility with black glances and the behaviour of a churl in the sulks.

So, though her voice was sweet to hear, and though, standing there in the warm penumbra of the olive orchard, tall and erect and graceful, in her bright frock, she made a charming picture, and though she offered a silver lira as a prize, the men merely stared at her churlishly, and went on with their work—languidly, sluggishly, as men who deemed the necessity to work an outrage, and weren't 

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