The proprietor has a new proposition, the effect of which upon me is intently watched.  He proposes to give me five big oranges for four sous.  I receive it with utter scorn, and a laugh of derision.  I will give two sous 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 fragrant, and more tempting than lumps of gold.  I take one, and ask him if it is sweet.  He shrugs his shoulders, raises his hands, and, with a sidewise shake of the head, and a look which says, How can you be so faithless? makes me ashamed of my doubts.