Scrub 
out the long hot days, men, women, and children are 
hard at work in some miserably small little plot or 
orchard. The returns must surely be great, but as only 
plots of a few square feet can be treated in this way, the 
profit to be made must be pitifully small. The acreage 
which is made into rich alluvial vegas, vineyards, and 
olive yards, and so undergoes this intense and careful 
petite culture, is‘exceedingly small as compared with the 
hills and dry valleys which are left to scrub or maqui. 
These are forbidding, arid, and desolate. One learns 
more about the story of the scrub by watching for a few 
minutes the proceedings of goats, and the other hungry 
beasts, than could be given in many pages of description. 
Cattle, horses, mules, donkeys, occasionally sheep, goats, 
and even pigs may be seen driven out to graze by their 
youthful herds. All are haggard and hungry looking, 
with projecting bones, and have a satirical and pes- 
simistic appearance. 
Yet these vegetable demons are very efficient in their 
horrible task, On a rocky hillside they know better 
than to touch the asphodel, grape hyacinths, crocus’, 
orchids, scillas, lachenalias, daffodils and the like, for 
all these beautiful and flourishing bulbs are deadly 
poisons. These woolly, hairy, and _ strong-scented 
lavenders, rosemaries, and the other scented labiates, 
are also allowed to grow as well at least as the dry 
and stony soil will permit. 
No animal could possibly take a mouthful of the for- 
biddingly glutinous and sticky foliage of the gum-cistus, 
or the viscid and glandular leaves of some Ononis, 
But any small grass seedling which has managed to 
put out a prostrate stem and a leaf or two not 13 inch 
long, vanishes with one sweep of the tongue. Should 
some edible herbaceous weed hide itself amongst the 
foliage of a lavender or a cistus, some hungry eye per- 
310 
