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It was not the piping of throstle or sweet-throated merle that had waked my Beltane, who with slumberous eyes stared up at carven canopy, round him upon rich arras, and down upon embroidered bed-covering and silken pillow, while through the narrow lattice the young sun played upon gilded roof-beam and polished floor.
Landing, they climbed the dewy hills spangled thick with forget-me-nots and late violets, till they reached a shady and secluded part of the river, where, surrounded by the songs of hundreds of sweet-throated birds, they commenced their sport, which kept them, well employed till a late hour in the afternoon.
Now beholding all this, my companion sank to the ground and sat very still and silent like one rapt in pleasing wonder. "O!" says she at last and very softly. "Surely here is an earthly paradise, O Martin, the beauty of it!" "Yet these flowers have no smell!" says I. "And for these gaudy birds I would give them all for one honest English robin or sweet-throated black bird!"
"Such was the delicious and excellent forest that the great bowman entered. And trees with branches beautified with clusters began to wave gently at the soft breeze and rain their flowers over the monarch's head. And the trees, clad in their flowery attires of all colours, with sweet-throated warblers perched on them, stood there in rows with heads touching the very heavens.
The monastery was always a very silent habitation, situated as it was on so lofty and barren a crag, it was far beyond the singing- reach of the smaller sweet-throated birds now and then an eagle clove the mist with a whirr of wings and a discordant scream on his way toward some distant mountain eyrie but no other sound of awakening life broke the hush of the slowly widening dawn.
"Such was the delicious and excellent forest that the great bowman entered. And trees with branches beautified with clusters began to wave gently at the soft breeze and rain their flowers over the monarch's head. And the trees, clad in their flowery attires of all colours, with sweet-throated warblers perched on them, stood there in rows with heads touching the very heavens.
How shall their stifling heat and towering palms, their gaudy birds and flowers, their roaring beasts and loathly reptiles, remind one of the cool, sweet glades, the scented bracken, the gnarled oaks, the leaping deer, and sweet-throated songsters of home? 'Tis the vision of the river, the tide, and the wheeling gulls that I shall see again in the land of 'El Dorado."
There was a sense of freedom and of openness which no one who has not been a prisoner in a siege can ever experience. In the morning sweet-throated cavalry trumpets sounded a reveille, which floated over hill and dale so chastely and calmly that one wished they might never stop.
Dimmer and duskier grew the long shadows now gathering in the Cathedral, two of the twinkling candles near the Virgin's statue suddenly sank in their sockets with a spluttering noise and guttered out, the solemn music of the organ continued, growing softer and softer as it sounded, till it crept through the vastness of the building like a light breeze wafted from the sea, bringing with it suggestions of far flower-islands in the tropics, golden shores kissed by languid foam, and sweet-throated birds singing, and still the Cardinal sat thinking of griefs and cares and inexplicable human perplexities, which were not his own, but which seemed to burden the greater portion of the world.
I had often heard her say that she loved birds dearly. Not wild songsters, however, who sing best in their native freedom of the skies, like the spotted-breasted, circle-carolling lark, the thicket-haunting blackbird, and the sweet-throated thrush. It would have afforded her no pleasure to prison up one of these in a cage.
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