Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/226

 when afar off on the sky-line she saw the great corn-wains passing black against the sun, laden with the wheat that in all time has made Maremma the granary of Rome, she looked at them with longing hungry eyes, as her father had looked from his lair upon the rich men traversing the vale below.

True, she did not know that there were such things as riches anywhere; the life of wealth, of luxury, was invisible to her; every one around her lived on roughly-made polenta, a sea or a fresh-water fish, a mussel, or an onion. This was all they tasted for relish or for rarity. All the opulence and ease of the world were hidden from her by the stretching sea, the solitude of the moors, the noxious and uninhabitable marsh. But she knew that there was a region where all the grain went, all the cut grass, the burned wood, the felled pines; a fairer, happier region, which rejoiced in all that left Maremma poor, and where sickness was not in the soil, nor fever always in the sunbeams.

Those immense plains which the men from the mountains ploughed and sowed in autumn, in summer were golden oceans of grain, reaped ere midsummer was passed.