Read Ebook: Harper's Young People September 28 1880 An Illustrated Weekly by Various

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Ebook has 301 lines and 19069 words, and 7 pages

Raphael came along, and greeted her. Raphael, a tall young fellow with bright eyes, a face the color of bronze, and a little black mustache, was the son of a merchant who kept goats and donkeys for the visitors who came here every year. The goats furnished rich milk for the invalids to drink, while the ladies and children rode the donkeys. Gita found Raphael very handsome.

He wore a curious straw hat with the brim turned up, a shirt striped with red, blue pantaloons, and a yellow sash about his waist. One could see he esteemed himself rather a dandy. In turn Raphael found Gita the prettiest girl of his acquaintance, with her large black eyes, brown face, and white teeth. Besides, Gita was amiable, and did not mock at him when he walked on the Promenade on Sunday with his hat on one side, and a cigarette in his mouth.

"I have asked the consent of my parents to our marriage," said Raphael. "They refuse, unless you have a dower of at least a hundred francs. We must wait."

Gita sighed and shook her head as she pursued her way down to the shore. In these countries the young people must obtain the consent of their parents to marry, and the bride should have a dowry. Gita had not a penny; Raphael's father might as well have asked him to bring the moon as one hundred francs.

Grandmother was seated under an archway, with her little furnace before her, roasting chestnuts. Grandmother, a wrinkled old woman, with a red handkerchief wound about her head, was a chestnut merchant. The sailors, children, and Italians coming over the border bought her wares, and when she was not employed in serving them she twisted flax on a distaff.

"Raphael's father needs a dowry of one hundred francs," said Gita, as grandmother gave her a few chestnuts.

"Ah, if you were a lemon girl!" said grandmother, beginning to twist the flax.

Gita poised a basket on her head, took a white stocking from her pocket, and began to knit as she walked away. The women of the country carry all burdens on their heads. You may see a mother with a mound of cut grass on her head, dandling a little baby in her arms as she moves along. Grandmother had been a lemon girl in her day, but Gita was not strong enough. The lemon girls bring the fruit on their heads many miles, from the lemon groves down to the ships, when they are sent to America and other distant lands.

When you next taste a lemonade at a Sunday-school picnic, little reader, remember how far the lemon has travelled to furnish you this refreshing drink.

Gita went along the shore knitting, her empty basket tilted on her head. The blue Mediterranean Sea sparkled as far as the eye could reach, and broke on the pebbles of the beach in waves as clear as crystal. Soon she turned back toward the hills, following a narrow path between high garden walls, passed under a railroad bridge, and entered an olive garden. She worked here all day, gathering up the little black olives which fall from the trees, much as children gather nuts in the woods at home. Other women were already at work; their dresses of gay colors, yellow and red, showed against the gray background of the trees. A boy beat the branches with a long pole. Gita began to work with the rest. She did not think much about the olive-tree, although it was a good friend. She was paid twenty sous a day to gather the berries from the ground, which were then taken to the crushing mill up the ravine to be made into oil. Gita ate the green lemons plucked from the trees as a child of the North would eat apples, but she loved the good olive-oil better. When the grandmother made a feast, it was to fry the little silvery sardines in oil, so crisp and brown.

The olive-tree is a native of Asia Minor, and often mentioned in the Bible. Some of the trees in the garden where Gita now worked were so old that the Romans saw them when they conquered the world.

At noon the olive-pickers paused to rest. Gita went away alone, and ate the handful of chestnuts given her by grandmother. When she returned to the town at night she would have another bit of bread and a raw onion. She seated herself on the edge of the ravine, and thought about Raphael as she munched her nuts. Below, this path traversed the ravine, and climbed the opposite slope to the wall of a pretty villa, one of the houses occupied for the winter by rich strangers. Gita looked at the villa, with its window shaded by lace curtains, balconies, and terraces, where orange-trees were covered with little golden balls of fruit.

"If I were rich like that I would have soup every day, sometimes made of pumpkin and sometimes with macaroni in it," she thought.

Then she turned over a stone with her heavy shoe, and it rolled down the hill. Gita uttered a cry. The stone had covered a hole at the root of the olive-tree where she sat, far away from the other workers. In the hole she saw a green frog; she dropped on her knees to look at it more closely. Yes, it was a green frog. How did it come there? She touched it with her fingers; the frog did not move or croak. Then she took it out carefully. The frog was one of those pasteboard boxes which appear each year in the shop windows of Paris for Easter presents, in company with fish, lobsters, and shells.

Gita raised the lid. Inside were bank-bills and a lizard. She knew lizards very well; they were always whisking over the stone walls; but then those were of a sober brown tint, while this one was white until she lifted it, when it sparkled like a dewdrop. The lizard was an ornament made of diamonds. Gita held her breath and closed her eyes. She believed herself asleep. Soon she rose, took the box in her hand, and crossing the ravine, began to climb the path to the villa above.

As she reached the door a pony-carriage drove up. A big servant with many buttons on his coat told her to go away. Gita paused, holding the box. The pale lady in the carriage, who was wrapped in furs, motioned her to approach. Quickly the girl ran forward and held out the frog.

"I found it in a hole at the foot of the olive-tree," she explained. "It must belong to this house."

The lady took the box and opened it, emptying the contents on her lap. There lay the diamond lizard, and the roll of French bank-notes.

"You see that Pierre was a dishonest servant, although nothing was found on him," said the lady to those about her. "He must have hidden this box in the olive grove to return from Nice later and find it."

Gita listened with her mouth and eyes wide open. The lady looked at her and smiled.

"You are a good girl," she said.

Then she selected one of the bills and gave it to Gita. It was a note of one hundred francs.

"Now I can marry Raphael!" she cried.

Raphael was standing beside grandmother's chestnut-roaster when both saw Gita running toward them, her cheeks red, and her eyes flashing like stars. She had to tell all about the frog, not only to them, but to the neighbors. As for grandmother, she could not hear the story often enough. When she had been a lemon girl no such luck had befallen her.

"Who would have thought of finding a wedding dowry in a frog?" laughed Raphael.

Gita and Raphael are soon to be married in the yellow church on the hill. The olive-pickers in the grove seek for something beside the dark berries; they hope to find a green frog under a stone, containing money and a diamond lizard; but this will never again happen.

JAPANESE LIFE.

The Japanese is the cleanest of mankind. Cleanliness is, so to speak, more than godliness with him. Though he has no soap, he washes all over at least once a day--he worships but once a week. His candles are made of vegetable wax. He uses a cotton coverlet, well stuffed and padded, for bed-covering and mattress. A sort of stereoscope case--made of wood--makes his pillow. He resorts to that, and so do his wife and daughters, that their carefully arranged hair may not be disarranged during sleep. No head-covering is worn by the Japanese. No nation dresses the hair so tastefully. Usually it is with the men shaved in sections. They are coming now to wear it in European fashion. They are adopting all European customs.

On lev?e day I saw the reception at the Mikado's palace in Yeddo. Every one presented had to come in European full dress. That dress does not become the Japanese figure. He looks awkward in it. His legs are too short. The tails of his claw-hammer coat drag on the ground, and the black dress trousers wrinkle up and get baggy around his feet. His European-fashioned clothes have been sent out ready-made from America or England, and in no case did I notice anything approaching to a good fit. Yet he smiled and looked happy, though he could not get his heels half way down his Wellington boots, and his hat was either too large or too small for his head. He always smiles and looks pleasant. Nothing can make him grumble, and he has not learned to swear. He is satisfied to be paid his due, and never asks for more. As a New York cabman he would be a veritable living curiosity.

WHERE DID POTATOES COME FROM?

Nobody knows precisely where the potato came from originally. It has been found, apparently indigenous, in many parts of the world. Mr. Darwin, for instance, found it wild in the Chonos Archipelago. Sir W. J. Hooker says that it is common at Valparaiso, where it grows abundantly on the sandy hills near the sea. In Peru and other parts of South America it appears to be at home; and it is a noteworthy fact that Mr. Darwin should have noted it both in the humid forests of the Chonos Archipelago and among the central Chilian mountains, where sometimes rain does not fall for six months at a stretch. It was to the colonists whom Sir Walter Raleigh sent out in Elizabeth's reign that we are indebted for our potatoes.

Herriot, who went out with these colonists, and who wrote an account of his travels, makes what may, perhaps, be regarded as the earliest mention of this vegetable. Under the heading of "Roots," he mentions what he calls the "openawk." "These roots," he says, "are round, some large as a walnut, others much larger. They grow on damp soils, many hanging together as if fixed on ropes. They are good food, either boiled or roasted."

At the beginning of the seventeenth century this root was planted, as a curious exotic, in the gardens of the nobility, but it was long ere it came into general use. Many held them to be poisonous, and it would seem not altogether unreasonably so either. The potato is closely related to the deadly-nightshade and the mandrake, and from its stems and leaves may be extracted a very powerful narcotic. In England prejudice against it was for a long time very strong, especially among the poor.

"MOONSHINERS."

BY E. H. MILLER.

CONNY FINDS A HOME.

Two days afterward, when the doctor went out for his horse, he found Conny sitting astride the block, his lap filled with sweet white clover, which he was feeding to Prince with one hand, while with the other he stroked the beautiful head that was bent down to him. He dropped to his feet on seeing the doctor, and made a bow, grave and stiff, but not at all bashful.

"I have come to live with you, sir," he said.

"Indeed," laughed the doctor; "and what do you suppose I want of you?"

"I don't know, sir; but my feyther always told me, if he died, I was not to stay on the mountain, but go to some good man who would teach me to work."

"And how do you know I am a good man?" asked the doctor, looking keenly at the boy. "You have never seen me but once."

"I have seen you often. I saw you when you mended the rabbit's leg. Jock Riley broke it with his big cart-whip."

"And where were you, pray?"

"Up in a tree, lying along a limb. And I was in the big tamarack when you climbed up the hill for the little flower. I often wanted to know why you cared to get it. My feyther thought perhaps it was good for medicine; but when I told him you only took one, he said then he couldn't tell; it might be you were crazed."

"Well, Conny," said he, "go into the house and get your breakfast, and when I come back we will talk this matter over."

He stopped for a word of explanation with his wife, and drove away, leaving Conny on the door-step, with a substantial slice of bread and meat in his hands, and a bowl of milk beside him, while little Betty peeped shyly at him through the window.

It gave the doctor a curious sensation to think, as he rode through the solitary woods, of the little watcher stretched along a mossy limb, or peering out from a treetop, like some strange, wild creature.

"He must have been set to keep guard by the moon-shiners," he thought. "I wonder if they suspected I meant them mischief?" And then like a flash came another thought: "They have sent him to me now as a spy to find out if I have any secret business for the government. I should rather enjoy giving them a scare, if it were not for my wife and Betty."

The doctor fully made up his mind before he went home to send Conny on his ways, but in the end he did no such thing. Old Timothy made much pretense of finding whether he belonged to Dunsmore or Killbourne, and talked bravely of taking him to the poor-house officers; but Timothy found him a great convenience to his rheumatic old hands and feet, and by the end of the summer Conny was as much at home as if he had been bought, like Betty's ugly little terrier, or born in the house, like blessed little Betty herself. It was Conny who gave the last rub to Prince, and brought him to the door; Conny who, in cold or heat, was ready with such good-natured promptness for any errand far or near; Conny who could mend and make; who oiled rusty hinges, repaired broken locks and latches, sharpened the kitchen knives, filed the old saws, and put new handles to all the cast-away tools on the premises. Best of all, in the doctor's eyes, it was Conny who knew every nook of mountain and forest, and whose swift feet and skillful fingers sought out every plant that grew, and brought it to his master's feet.

Only Bridget held to her deep suspicion of something wrong about Conny.

"The cratur's that shmart wid his two hands ye wudn't belave, mum, but I misthrust he's shly: it's in the blood of 'im.

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