olives upon the tree for the benefit of the houseless vagrant and very poor gleaner, who will be sure to visit the spot so soon as the peasant returns to his home. By this act, in many cases ignorantly, they follow the injunctions of the Old Testament. Every day, just at the close of evening, the peasant loads the day’s produce upon horses, mules, asses, and even oxen, and conveys them in safety to the proprietor’s house on the estate: returning with his beasts of burthen in time for a good night’s rest, to brace him up against to-morrow’s labours. When all the trees have been so served, then the hut and the baskets, the mats, the peasant and his family, all disappear from the field of action, and the olive groves relapse into solitude, made sadder still by the plaintive cooing of the turtle dove, who is possibly telling his mate that the winter is nigh—and that they had better return to their winter quarters in the mosque at the entrance gate of the nearest town.
This does not complete the peasant’s labour upon the olive harvest; but the remainder of the work has to be conducted under the experienced and wary eye of the proprietor of the estate, and it requires some considerable practical experience to judge which olives are best adapted for one purpose, and which for another.
Firstly, the whole has to be sorted into three different qualities: the pulpy, juicy, and well-matured olives are set aside for extracting the finest edible or salad oil; the barely ripened, green, hard, and transparent ones are collected for pickling in salt and water; the inferior, including those that are unripe, small, and almost devoid of juice, and blown down by the wind, are kept to be preserved in olive oil; while all the refuse, the dried up, worm-eaten, blighted, and so forth, are converted into very inferior, black, thick oil, which is burnt in lamps by the poorer classes of the population. They use a very primitive mill, constructed of a couple of ponderous mill-stones or grinding stones, the upper one of which is turned by means of a stout beam inserted into a bore in the stone, one end being secured to the neck of a mule or bullock, which walks round and round under the lash and is always blindfolded to prevent its getting dizzy. Scooped out of the bottom stone is a deep, narrow duct, through which the oil bruised out from the olives oozes through a fine sieve into large wooden troughs, whence the oil is poured into skins or immense glass bottles firmly secured or corked, and hung up or warehoused, out of the reach of destructive rats and mice. The sound produced by the turning of the mill and the crushing of the olives is of a monotonous wheezing sort, sometimes swelling into loud notes, and then suddenly subsiding into silence. The smell is disagreeable and overpowering, and both smell and noise extend over a considerable distance amongst the surrounding hills and valleys in the height of the olive season. When pressing the inferior oils for lamps, the sieve is dispensed with, and the thick matter is allowed to settle to the bottom of ponderous earthenware jars, whence the oil is ladled out for nightly use. Whether burnt in the silver-gilt lamp of the lord of the manor, swinging from the roof of his loftier halls, or consumed in the baked clay lamp of the peasant, or shoved into a niche in his miserable hut, the stench and smoke emitted are abominable.
When the oil has been all extracted, and the olives pickled or preserved, then the peasant pays one final visit to the olive grove, hacking down such trees as are too old to yield any more crops. By the side of these he has long before planted shoots, which are now growing up into young trees, and may yield their first crop next year.
It is high time now for me to cork up my jar of olives; for whilst I have been speaking about them, I have been dipping for an olive every now and then, and I call to mind that they are of a very heating nature, and apt to produce fever, if eaten in too great quantities: especially is this the case with the black olives, the finest of which are produced in Damascus, and in size and colour resemble a fine prune with the bloom on.
THE DISTRESS IN SKYE.
The writer of a letter in the “Times” of December 2nd, dating from the Theological College at Wells, has thought fit to dispute the statements as to the distress existing in Skye which were made in a recent number of Once a Week.[1] To this the Editor can reply that the writer of the article had the information there quoted from the Minister of Sleat, and that on various other points he has a satisfactory answer to his critic’s objections. The author of the paper himself says, in reply to the writer:
“The valuable farms that he speaks of, belong to the lairds; those which I speak of are the crofts of the peasantry. It was of agricultural products that I spoke, as being the only things attempted, viz., oats and potatoes. Of course the sheep and cattle of the great graziers are not destroyed by the rains; as for the failure of the oats and potatoes, look at Mr. Forbes’ letter; as for the price of fish, the people have not money wherewith to buy. As for the peat, all accounts agree that there is this year a double stock throughout Ireland, from the drying of two years’ stock; from the north of Ireland a freight would cost little. Let people judge, however, how to supply the fuel, but it must be sent. The narrowest part of the strip of stormy sea is one mile broad; at this season so stormy that for many days together the ferry cannot be crossed. The south-east part of the island is the agricultural part—in which lies Sleat; I need not say that the most distressed portions are those where the land lies lowest, and where the peasantry chiefly live, from their dependence on the fishery.”
Such are the chief points of the letter in the “Times,” to which our contributor thinks it necessary to make this cursory answer.—Ed. O. a W.
