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THE GYPSIES 237
toil, From our voices she can tell that we are
strangers; she does not turn round, but simply col-
lapses under her load, continues dragging along ahead
of us like one mortally ill, moaning and lamenting:
“Oh, I am dying! - Jesus, Jesus, Iam dying. Oh, Oh!”
She closes her eyes, opens her mouth like a bird about
to choke and puts out a trembling hand to us. A small
copper coin allays her attack only long enough to per-
mit her to open her eyes and observe the insignificance
of the gift—whereupon she has an immediate relapse.
But when she sees us going on our way, she suspends
her death-agony and the next moment strides by us
with vigorous steps, with a pardonable but ill-meant
mutter on her lips.
Few men on God’s green earth live in such lovely
surroundings as these pariahs. The wide snow fields
of the Sierra gleam like silver in the noon-day sun;
you can see them thirty miles away, yet so near that you
can distinguish the caravans winding over their surface.
The snow that fell the night before may still be seen
along the northern side of all the hills. The moun-
tains round the Vega are like a white wreath crowning
the luxurious ever-green plain. The city seems to run
down the steep slope, break into a chasm and spread
over the plain, inhabited by masses of foliage which
roll in upon the houses like surging billows in an ocean
of green. The Vega itself, though its circumference is
more than a hundred miles, seems small; it is as flat as
a lake and the houses speck it with white dots like sails.
Already the fruit-trees turn green below us, and on all
the southern slopes of the ranges and far into the deep
riverbeds there is a warm flickering of blinding white
and coral red, the colors of blossoming almond-trees,
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