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But his winter does not last for ever. When the bitter months are past, with March that mocks us with its crown of daffodils; when the sun shines, and the rain is soon over; and elms and limes in park and avenue, and unsightly smoke-blackened brushwood in the squares, are dressed once more in tenderest heart-refreshing green, even in London we know that the birds have returned from beyond the sea.
On the great, smoke-blackened metal plate over which those mystics passed who had to walk through fire, there lay plenty of charcoal, and yonder hung robes of every description. The next moment she had thrown off her own, in order to blacken her glistening white limbs and her face with soot. Among the sewing materials which the lady Euryale had laid beside the scrolls was a pair of scissors.
A dreary afternoon was already turning into evening as the train pulled into the narrow, smoke-blackened, queerly familiar train-shed; under the dirty glass roof the thick smoke still gathered into roundish clumps and floated back and forth in long ragged ribbons, just as when Tonio Kröger rode away with nothing but mockery in his heart.
Down!" hissed the lieutenant. But he need not have uttered the command. All had been told what to do, and fell on their faces literally their smoke-blackened faces. In this position they resembled, as nearly as might be, some of the dead bodies scattered about, and that was their intention. Still each one had a nervous fear.
In one corner there stood an old spinning-wheel covered with dust, and with a smoke-blackened tuft of wool still hanging from its reel; from which, and from other small indications, it might be surmised that there had once been a woman in the house, and that tuft of wool had probably been her last spin.
She drew the cartridges from chamber and magazine, oiled the rifling, polished the lock, and reloaded the piece. "Thar now," she said, softly, "I reckon ther old rifle-gun's ready." As she sat there alone in the shuck-bottomed chair, the corners of the room wavered in huge shadows, and the smoke-blackened cavern of the fireplace, glaring like a volcano pit, threw her face into relief.
Looking forward Pancha could see the ranks dark to the limit of her vision; looking back, the faces, smoke-blackened, sweat-streaked, marked with fierce tension, with fear, with dogged endurance, with cool courage, with blank incomprehension. The hot breath of the fire swept about them, the sound of its triumphant march was in their ears, a backward glance showed its first high flame crests.
Even the dingy Midland landscape, with its smoke-blackened woods and lifeless grass, assumed a glory of great light; the soft, interlacing clouds parted before the dying sun; the water received the golden flood, and each coot and water-hen shone jet and glossy in the blaze.
I could tell you just how every stone on the road looks Rojate, the narrow pass beyond, and then the long valley with the vines; then the road turns away and rises as you go along the plateau of Arcinazzo, which is hollow beneath, and you can hear the echoes as you tread; then at the end of that the desperate old inn, called by the shepherds the Madre dei Briganti, the mother of brigands, smoke-blackened within and without, standing alone on the desolate heath; farther on, a broad bend of the valley to the left, and you see Trevi rising before you, crowned with an ancient castle, and overlooking the stream that becomes the Aniene afterwards; from Trevi through a rising valley that grows narrower at every step, and finally seems to end abruptly, as indeed it does, in a dense forest far up the pass.
The white roses gleamed pink, and a pool of water that had run down from a gutter shone like newly-shed blood. The deserted garden, the empty casements, the smoke-blackened walls, the glowing colour in the sky, and the red pool on the ground: this was a picture of war, in which men were laid low beneath blossoming rose trees, whose roots were drenched in their hearts' blood.
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