MYTHS After the sculptor's arrival, however, the young Count sometimes came down from his forlorn elevation, and rambled with him among the neighboring woods and hills.

He led his friend to many enchanting nooks, with which he himself had been familiar in his childhood.

But of late, as he remarked to Kenyon, a sort of strangeness had overgrown them, like clusters of dark shrubbery, so that he hardly recognized the places which he had known and loved so well.
To the sculptor's eye, nevertheless, they were still rich with beauty.
They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive way where wildness, in a long lapse of years, has crept over scenes that have been once adorned with the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do no more for them, time and nature came, and wrought hand in hand to bring them to a soft and venerable perfection.

There grew the fig-tree that had run wild and taken to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various progeny--the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice, and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final charm--on the same bough together.
In Kenyon's opinion, never was any other nook so lovely as a certain little dell which he and Donatello visited.

It was hollowed in among the hills, and open to a glimpse of the broad, fertile valley.