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Joy, joy twittered in the reed-flute of Sebastiano, and the boys were joys made manifest. Hermione's eyes had filled with tears of joy when among the olives she had heard the far-off drone of the "Pastorale." Now they shone with a joy that was different, less subtly sweet, perhaps, but more buoyant, more fearless, more careless.

What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors, that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign joviality.

Rarely was any fee exacted for the lesson given. For the rest, none were too proud to earn a few sous by sweeping, or drawing water, or amusing with a tune on the reed-flute; or to wear the cast-off tunics of their masters. This account refers to the study of logic and theology, which soon became dominant in Paris and in various cathedral schools in other parts of France.

She heard him presently among the oak-trees immediately below her, passing almost at her feet. To Hermione the thin sound of the reed-flute always had suggested Arcady.

Few sounds, and these but slight ones, stirred in the breast of the ardent silence; some little notes of birds, fragmentary and wandering, wayward as pilgrims who had forgotten to what shrine they bent their steps, some little notes of bells swinging beneath the tufted chins of goats, the wail of a woman's song, old in its quiet melancholy, Oriental in its strange irregularity of rhythm, and the careless twitter of a tarantella, played upon a reed-flute by a secluded shepherd-boy beneath the bending silver green of tressy olives beside a tiny stream.

The reed-flute of the shepherd boy twittered, as perhaps, long ago, on the great mountain that looked down in the night above the village, a similar flute twittered from the woods to Empedocles climbing upward for the last time towards the plume of smoke that floated from the volcano. And then Amedeo and Gaspare danced together and Maurice's arm was about the waist of Maddalena.