It is more definite as to the plain
we were traversing, with its increasing number of white cottages,
cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the land in small holdings,
so different from the vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of
wheat-fields and olive orchards which we had been passing through. It
did not appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of
peasant ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but
their neatness testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and their
frequency cheered our way as the evening waned and the lamps began to
twinkle from their windows. At a certain station, I am reminded by my
careful mentor, the craggy mountain-tops were softened by the sunset
pink, and that then the warm afternoon air began to grow cooler, and the
dying day to empurple the uplands everywhere, without abating the charm
of the blithe cottages. It seems to have been mostly a very homelike
scene, and where there was a certain stretch of woodland its loneliness
was relieved by the antic feat of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs
to browse the olive leaves on their native bough. The air was thinner
and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented and blew lullingly
in at our window.
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