The driver led the oxen to the farther end of the vineyard, and the boys and girls climbed upon the wagon with their baskets, and were carried under the festoons of vines, picking clusters of grapes here and there as they rode slowly along.
"I should like to help pick the grapes," said Edith wistfully, as she watched the merry pickers at their task.
Rafael asked one of the men if she might be allowed to do so. He smiled and nodded, pointing to an empty basket on the ground, and soon the two children were filling it together, and laughing and shouting with the others.
"This is like a moving picture," Edith said to Rafael, when at last their basket was filled and they had climbed into the ox-cart to ride with the overflowing baskets and grape-stained children to the farm-house.
As they passed under the vines, Edith cut off some of the trailing ends and made crowns for the bareheaded, black-haired peasant girls, and one of them, more daring than the others, crowned Edith's own black hair.
Mrs. Sprague had already found her way to the house, and to the heart of the farmer's wife, by admiring the little baby that lay sleeping in its cradle under a fig tree near-by.
The baby was wrapped in a swaddling band, a piece of linen four or five yards long, which is wound round and round the tiny body, beginning just under the arms and ending at the toes. It is a curious fashion the Italians have of dressing their babies, and has been followed ever since the Mother Mary wrapped the infant Jesus in a swaddling band, so many hundred years ago.
"Pretty bambino," Mrs. Sprague had said, pointing to the baby, and the mother had found a hundred things to say in reply, in her voluble Italian fashion, not one word of which Mrs. Sprague could understand.
The farmer's wife was still talking when the vintage procession swung into the yard, the boys and girls lifting their voices in a festival song and keeping time to the swinging of the horns of the great white oxen.
Then there was the merry confusion of emptying the grapes into the huge vats, and the choosing of certain men and maidens to trample out the purple juice.
Two or three always stand together in a single vat and press the grapes with their bare feet, thus forcing out the juice, which runs through an opening in the base of the vat into a wooden bucket.