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But I maun away, and trim my little cottage fire, and make it burn and blaze up bonnie, to warm the crickets, and my cold and crazy bones, that maun soon be laid aneath the green sod in the eerie kirkyard." And away the old dame tottered to her cottage, secured the door on the inside, and soon the hearth-flame was seen to glimmer and gleam through the key-hole and window.

Across the lake the golden glory stole, and girls came tip-toeing to the hearth-flame in soft, ceremonial dress, fringed and beaded, the firelight, like dawn, flushing the pearl of their headbands, and Pem forgot the enigma of that eighteen-year-old youth who seemed to have a trick of bobbing up, now and again, under the lee of a summer holiday, like some menacing spar to leeward of a vessel in fair sail.

But I maun away, and trim my little cottage fire, and make it burn and blaze up bonnie, to warm the crickets and my cold and crazy bones that maun soon be laid aneath the green sod in the eerie kirkyard." And away the old dame tottered to her cottage, secured the door on the inside, and soon the hearth-flame was seen to glimmer and gleam through the keyhole and window.

Then, as often aforetime, we gathered together in the cheer of the red hearth-flame, while outside the wind of a winter twilight sang through fair white valleys brimmed with a reddening sunset, and a faint, serene, silver-cold star glimmered over the willow at the gate. "Well," said Felicity, drawing a relieved breath, "I'm glad she's gone. She certainly is queer, just as mother said."

The traveller who approaches one of them toward night-fall, sees the flicker of the hearth-flame through the chinks in the walls; and at night, if the wind rises, he hears the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees. Who would not suppose that this poor hut is the asylum of rudeness and ignorance?

Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of this frigid Norseland. But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun.