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Updated: May 23, 2025
The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets that looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and, from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells.
The sheep-bells rang as clearly in the vigorous air, as if they felt its wholesome influence like living creatures; the trees, in lieu of leaves or blossoms, shed upon the ground a frosty rime that sparkled as it fell, and might have been the dust of diamonds. So it was to Tom.
It was a very distant vagrant tinkling, as of sheep-bells on a common in old Europe; they looked at one another, and Andy crossed himself reverently. 'Like chapel bells over the say from poor Ireland, he muttered, and crept to the door, which Robert had opened. 'Sure there isn't fairies all the ways out here? an' 'tis mighty like it'
But when she laughed his arm stole back again; and Fleur began to sing: "O who will oer the downs so free, O who will with me ride? O who will up and follow me " "Sing, Jon!" Jon sang. The larks joined in, sheep-bells, and an early morning church far away over in Steyning. They went on from tune to tune, till Fleur said: "My God! I am hungry now!" "Oh! I am sorry!"
Even in the first week of December, the russet and amber-coloured leaves still cling to the branches of the huge old lime-trees of Lorette, and my lonely feet on the thick carpet of dead leaves below made the sole sound I heard there except the ceaseless musical tinkle of chisel and stone from the distant granite quarries a succession of notes altogether rural in suggestion like the tinkle of many sheep-bells.
The old heart and the young heart were beating alike as these exiles followed the narrow footpath round the shoulder of the great hill; they could hear the lambs bleat and the tinkling of the sheep-bells that sweet May morning. From the lower hillside came the sound of voices. The neighbors had seen them pass, and were calling to each other across the fields.
But, when the sun is low, and the shadows creep out, when the old inn blinks drowsy eyes at the cottages, and they blink back drowsily at the inn, like the old friends they are; when distant cows low at gates and fences; when sheep-bells tinkle faintly; when the weary toiler, seated sideways on his weary horse, fares, homewards, nodding sleepily with every plodding hoof-fall, but rousing to give one a drowsy "good night," then who can resist the somnolent charm of the place, save only the "Bull" himself, snorting down in lofty contempt as rolling of eye, as curly of horn, as stiff as to tail as any indignant bull ever was, or shall be.
Many wooden cottages nested under the Park walls, and sent their smoke curling through the foliage of the fine trees that formed a bold, rich back-ground. The palace, extending its squares and courts along the river's brink, gave an air of dignity to the whole scene; while the tinkling music of the sheep-bells, echoing from the heath, lent to it a soft and harmonising effect.
The air here is full of music, the rich harmonies of many instruments and the voices of the nymphs who sing their choruses to Venus, but his ears are tired of the sounds, and he wishes that he might hear only the sleepy tinkle of the sheep-bells, chiming with the voice of the brook. But more than everything else he thinks of the princess.
Surely an hour had passed, perhaps even more. He began to tingle with impatience. The sound of the sheep-bells had died away beyond the colonnade of the echoes. A living silence was now about him. At last he put on his hat and got up. The Hermes was proving his power too mercilessly, was stealing the hours like a thief at work in the dark.
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