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John on the shoulder. A great chill seemed to have passed over the world, and on the hill-tops there was a faint light. Both men looked to the east, and there, beyond the Forza hills, was the red foreglow spreading over the grey. It was dawn, and with the dawn came safety. The fires had burned low, and the vagrant morning winds were beginning to scatter the white ashes.
The soil which it loves best is of a stony, and often sterile character, and dry barren hill-tops are frequently covered with cedars, while the more moist and fertile valleys between possess a sylva of a far different character. There is a variety of the red cedar, which trails upon the ground like a creeping plant, its branches even taking root again.
Pursuing the path over a stony valley lying between parallel ranges of hill, we halted at about 10 A.M. in a large patch of grass-land, the produce of the rain, which for some days past had been fertilising the hill-tops. Whilst our beasts grazed greedily, we sat under a bush, and saw far beneath us the low country which separates the Ghauts from the sea.
Before them, lying in the golden mist of twilight, was a sea of distant hill-tops, purple and shadow-black and gray. The sky bent down its tender, mellow sphere, and touched them softly. Sylvie stood still, with folded hands, and Rodney stopped the horse. A rod or two back, just at the edge of the level, the loaded wagon had stopped also. "Hills, and the sunset, and stillness," said Sylvie.
There were four beds in the little upstairs room; and we slept six. But I had a bed to myself, and persuaded them to leave the window open. The room was full of a transparent darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the five different nightcaps on the pillows. But out of the window the dawn was growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about to flood the plateau.
And it had belonged to him this man who had taken her life out of its dreary groove and placed it in a pleasure-garden of plenty; but the garden gate was not locked and the key was not in her keeping. This mood was momentary. It passed, scudding across her mind, a fringe of rain cloud that the wind has caught hanging between the hill-tops and driven at its will.
So, for an hour or two, they rolled along the smooth road, luxuriating in the summer sights and sounds about them; the wayside cottages, with women working in the gardens; villages clustered round some tiny, picturesque church; windmills whirling on the distant hill-tops; vineyards full of peasants tying up the young vines, or trudging by with baskets on their backs, heaped with green cuttings for the goats at home.
That evening bonfires were lighted on all the hill-tops; and a great banquet was held in the Castle, at which the Princess appeared amidst loud cheering, and, holding her father's hand, drank from a golden goblet to the health of her Godfather, the Shore-Troll, and the Sea-grandmother. In the very heart of a great forest in Sweden lived a Bear family, called "Bjornson."
In Italy they convert men, not by preaching sermons, but by giving them wafers to swallow, not by conveying truth into the mind, but by lodging a little dough in the stomach. Hence many of their churches stand on hill-tops, or in the midst of swamps, where not a house is in sight. During my sojourn of three weeks, I heard but two sermons by Roman preachers.
To that the soul travelled, halting once and again on the hill-tops to strip off the green leaves in which the mourners had clad it. Here and there by the wayside some lingering ghost would tie a knot in the ribbon-like leaves of the flax plant such knots as foreigners hold to be made by the whipping of the wind. As the souls gathered at their goal, nature's sounds were hushed.
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