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Skull-Splitter, by way of diversion, plumped backward into the brook, and sat down in the cool pool up to his waist. But nobody laughed at his mishap; because they had their minds full of more serious thoughts. Wolf-in-the-Temple, who had climbed up on a big moss-grown boulder, stood, gun in hand, and peered in among the bushes. "Boys," he whispered, "drop down on your bellies quick."

So, by an accident of idleness, he presently found himself standing rapt before the most wonderful picture he had ever seen, a picture to see which, he said to himself, men would make pilgrimages to Tyre, when Tyre was a moss-grown, ruinous seaport, from which the traffic of the world had long since passed away.

The fourth side of the enceinte stands on a solid rock, above the little river that loses itself in the flat-lands bordering the Gironde, so that it can scarce be called a tributary of that wide water. A moss-grown path round the walls will give a quick walker ten minutes' exercise to make the round from one tower of the gateway to the other.

In our province we are so aloof from all movement, so remote in our seclusion, so moss-grown in our antiquity, so wedded to the past, to old customs, old habits, old ways of act and thought, that the modern world shocks us as impious, odious, and intolerable."

After wending our way among tombs, and statues, and monuments; miniature temples, columns, obelisks, sarcophagi carved in snow-white marble passing graves that spoke of recent affliction others of older date, but garnished with fresh flowers the symbols of lore or affection that still lingered we seated ourselves upon a moss-grown slab, with the fronds of the Babylonian willow waving above our heads, and drooping mournfully around us.

My own early childhood was spent there, among the old-time gardens, and avenues of lordly cypresses and of bitter orange trees, and the moss-grown fountains, and long walks fragrant with half-wild roses and sweet flowers that no one thinks of planting now.

She kept to the stones of the creek for a pathway, jumping lightly from those that were moss-grown to those that hid their nakedness in the dark, velvet shadows of early morning, her white feet touching the shallow stream like pale gulls that dipped and skimmed. "Diana’s Pool," as she called it, was always clear.

The canal was there as of old, passing through the town from end to end and bisecting the market-place in the center into two equal-sized triangles connected by a narrow stone bridge; and there, on the other bank, was the old market with its moss-grown roofs, and the Rue Berond leading away to the left and the Sedan road to the right, but filling the Rue de Vouziers in front of him and extending as far as the Hotel de Ville was such a compact, swarming, buzzing crowd that he was obliged to raise his eyes and take a look over the roof of the notary's house at the slate-covered bell tower in order to assure himself that that was the quiet spot where he had played hop-scotch when he was a youngster.

He divides his life between a beautiful residence at Genoa, where he overlooks the waters of the sparkling Mediterranean, and a country villa near his native Busseto, a house of quaint artistic architecture, approached by a venerable, moss-grown stone bridge, at the foot of which are a large park and artificial lake.

The moss-grown cell, Aby! With a few scattered eglantines and wild roots! We will plant ivy round the three old oaks, and bring a colony of owls to breed! Then at the bottom of all a grotto: Oh! it will be delicious! Shells will be expensive, for we are not within forty miles of the sea. But no matter: it must and it shall be done, for I have set my heart on it.