Page:The vintage; a romance of the Greek war of independence (IA vintageromanceof00bensrich).pdf/101

 stood too long on the lees in contact with the skins and stalks it would become bitter. The crust itself Constantine removed from all the barrels and put into the still for the making of spirits. This only required one man to look after, and on the day Mitsos went to Epidaurus to got the resin he employed himself with it.

The apparatus was of the simplest. He placed all the crusts from the barrels in a big iron pot, under which he lit a slow charcoal fire; into a hole in the lid of this, which screwed on to the body, he inserted a bent iron pipe, on to which he screwed another pipe made in spirals. A big wooden tub filled with water, through the bottom of which passed a third pipe fitting at one end into the spirals which lay in the water, and communicating at the other with the glazed jar into which the spirit was to be stored, completed the apparatus. The fire drove off the alcohol from the fermented crust in a vapor, which distilled itself into spirit as it passed through the tube that lay in the cold water, and dripped out at the farther end into the jar.

He finished the day's work by soon after five, and, having business in Nauplia, set off there at once; so that Mitsos, returning a little later from Epidaurus with the resin, fonnd him out, and, without waiting to get any food, he set off again at once dowh to the bay.

It was drawing near that moment when all the beanty of the day in sea, land, and sky is gathered into the ten minutes of sunset. The sun, declining to its setting, was dropping slowly above a low pass in the hills, shining with an excecding clearness, and it was still half an hour above the horizon when Mitsos got into the boat. The land-breeze was blowing temperate and firm, and his boat dipped to it gently, and glided steadily on the outward tack. Between him and the Argive hills hung a