The mulberries are of richest dark velvet green; the
almonds, one glory of rose-colour in early spring, are now of a paler
and colder green; the olives (as all the world knows) of a dusty
grey, which looks all the more desolate in the pruning time of early
spring, when half the boughs of the evergreen are cut out, leaving
the trees stripped as by a tempest, and are carried home for fire-
wood in the quaint little carts, with their solid creaking wheels,
drawn by dove-coloured kine. Very ancient are some of these olives,
or rather, olive-groups. For when the tree grows old, it splits, and
falls asunder, as do often our pollard willows; the bark heals over
on the inside of each fragment, and what was one tree becomes many,
springing from a single root, and bearing such signs of exceeding age
that one can well believe the country tale, how in the olive grounds
around Nismes are still fruiting olives which have furnished oil for
the fair Roman dames who cooled themselves in the sacred fountain of
Nemausa, in the days of the twelve Caesars.
Between the pollard rows are everywhere the rows of vines, or of what
will be vines when summer comes, but are now black knobbed and
gnarled clubs, without a sign of life save here and there one fat
green shoot of leaf and tendril bursting forth from the seemingly
dead stick.
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