Without the court, and to the gates adjoined
A spacious garden lay, fenced all around,
Secure, four acres measuring complete,
There grew luxuriant many a lofty tree,
Pomgranate, pear, the apple blushing bright,
The honeyed fig, and unctuous olive smooth.
Those fruits, nor winter's cold nor summer's heat
Fear ever, fail not, wither not, but hang
Perennial, while unceasing zephyr breathes
Gently on all, enlarging these, and those
Maturing genial; in an endless course.
Pears after pears to full dimensions swell,
Figs follow figs, grapes clustering grow again
Where clusters grew, and (every apple stripped)
The boughs soon tempt the gatherer as before.
There too, well rooted, and of fruit profuse,
His vineyard grows; part, wide extended, basks
In the sun's beams; the arid level glows;
In part they gather, and in part they tread
The wine-press, while, before the eye, the grapes
Here put their blossoms forth, there gather fast
Their blackness. On the garden's verge extreme
Flowers of all hues[040] smile all the year, arranged
With neatest art judicious, and amid
The lovely scene two fountains welling forth,
One visits, into every part diffused,
The garden-ground, the other soft beneath
The threshold steals into the palace court
Whence every citizen his vase supplies.
_Homer's Odyssey, Book VII_.
The mode of watering the garden-ground, and the use made of the water by
the public--