The Wheat Princess Author:Jean Webster General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1905 Original Publisher: The Century Co. Subjects: Fiction / Literary Fiction / Romance / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book... more » you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV THE announcement that a principe Americano was coming to live in Villa Vivalanti occasioned no little excitement in the village. Wagons with furnishings from Rome had been seen to pass on the road below the town, and the contadini in the wayside vineyards had stopped their work to stare, and had repeated to each other ru mors of the fabulous wealth this signor principe was said to possess. The furniture they allowed to pass without much controversy: a prince, of course, has use for many articles which a poor man would only find in the way. But they shook their heads dubiously when two wagons full of flowering trees and shrubs wound up the roadway toward the villa. This foreigner must be a grasping person -- as if there were not trees enough already in the Sabine hills, that he must bring out more from Rome! The dissection of the character of Prince Vivalanti's new tenant occupied so much of the people's time that the spring pruning of the vineyards came near to being slighted. The fountainhead of all knowledge on the subject was the landlord of the Croce d'Oro. He himself had had the honor of entertaining their excellencies at breakfast, on the occasion of their first visit to Castel Vivalanti, and with unvarying eloquence he nightly recounted the story to an interested group of loungers in the trattoria kitchen: of how he had made the omelet without garlic because princes have delicate stomachs and cannot eat the food one would cook for ordinary men; of how they had sat at that very table, and th...« less