bottles, yonder, with the purple seal!  Here is that very wine, my friends.  Pour and hold it up to the sunset before you taste.  Had ever wine such a royal heart?  I will tell you how to grow it.  Choose first of all a vineyard facing south, between mountains and the sea.  Let it lie so that it drinks the sun the day through; but let the protecting mountains carry perpetual snow to cool the land breeze all the night.  Having chosen your site, drench it for two hundred years with the blood of freemen; drench it so deep that no tap-root can reach down below its fertilizing virtue.  Plant it in defeat, and harvest it in hope, grape by grape, fearfully, as though the bloom on each were a state’s ransom.  Next treat it after the recipe of the wine of Cos; dropping the grapes singly into vats of sea water, drawn in stone jars from full fifteen fathoms in a spell of halcyon weather and left to stand for the space of one moon.  Drop them in, one by one, until the water scarcely cover the mass.  Let stand again for two days, and then call for your maidens to tread them, with hymns, under the new moon.  Ah, and yet you may miss!  For your maidens must be clean, and yet fierce as though they trod out the hearts of men, as indeed they do.  A king’s daughter should lead them, and they must trample with innocence, and yet with such fury as the prophet’s who said ’their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment:  for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.’ . . .”

My father lifted his glass.  “To thee, Emilia, child and queen!”

He drank, and, setting down his glass, rested silent for a while, his eyes full of a solemn rapture.

“My friends,” he went on at length, with lowered voice, “know you that old song?

“’Methought I walked still to and fro,
And from her company could not go—­
But when I waked it was not so: 
In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.’

“All that autumn I spent under her father’s roof, and—­my leave having been extended—­all the winter following.  The old Count had convinced himself by this time that by accepting the crown he would confer a signal service on Corsica, and had opened a lengthy correspondence with the two Paolis, whose hesitation to accept this view at once puzzled and annoyed him.  For me, I wished the correspondence might be prolonged for ever, for meanwhile I lived my days in company with Emilia, and we loved.

“I was a fool.  Yet I cannot tax myself that I played false to duty, though by helping to crown her father I was destroying my own hopes, since as heiress to his throne Emilia must be far removed from me.  We scarcely thought of this, but lived in our love, we two.  So the winter passed and the spring came and the macchia burst into flower.