in and again,
sometimes more slowly, sometimes more quickly, seeming to lay stress on
some phrases more than on others; and another voice, fainter and feebler
than his own, repeated the trills and roulades after him fitfully, and
often breaking down altogether. It was plain that there in the wild-rose
hedge he was teaching his son. Any one who will may hear these sweet
lessons given under bays and myrtle, under arbutus and pomegranate,
through all the month of June.

Nightingales in Marca were only regarded as creatures to be trapped,
shot, caged, eaten, sold for a centime like any other small bird; but
about the church no one touched them: the people knew that their
_parocco_ cared to hear their songs coming sweetly through the pauses in
the recitatives of the office. Absorbed as he was now in hearkening to
the music-lesson among the white dog-roses, he started violently as a
shadow fell across the threshold and a voice called to him,
"Good-evening, Don Gesualdo."

He looked up and saw a woman whom he knew well,--a young woman, scarcely
indeed eighteen years old, very handsome, with a face full of warmth and
color and fire and tenderness, great flashing eyes which could at times
be as soft as a dog's, and a beautiful ruddy mouth with teeth as white
as a dog's are also. She was by name Generosa Fe: she was the wife of
Tasso Tassilo, the miller. In Marca, most of the women by toil and sun
were black as berries by the time they were twenty, and looked old
almost before they were young, with rough hair and loose forms and
wrinkled skins, and children dragging at their breasts all the year
through. Generosa was not like them: she did little work; she had the
form of a goddess; she took care of her beauty, and she had no children,
though she had married at fifteen. She was friends with Gesualdo; they
had both come from the Bocca d'Arno, and it was a link of common memory
and mutual attachment. They liked to recall how they had each run
through the tall canes and cactus, and waded in the surf, and slept in
the hot sand, and hidden themselves for fright when the king's camels
had come towards them, throwing their huge misshapen shadows over the
seas of flowering reeds and rushes.

He remembered her a small child, jumping about on the sand and laughing
at him, a youth, when he was going to college to study for entrance into
the Church. "Gesualdo! che Gesualdo!" she had cried. "A fine priest he
will make for us all to confess