ae, and little mice scudding
on the floors, and a sun-dial painted on the wall, and a crucifix set
above the weather-cock, and through the huge unglazed windows sight of
the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest-carts beneath them, or
of some hilly sunlit road with a mule-team coming down it, or of a blue
high hill with its pine-trees black against the sky, and on its slopes
the yellow corn and misty olive. This was their garden; it is ten
thousand other gardens in the land.

The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them, and thought
nothing better could be needed for any scene of Annunciation or
Adoration, and so put them in beyond the windows of Bethlehem or behind
the Throne of the Lamb--and who can wonder?

* * *

In these little ancient burghs and hillside villages, scattered up and
down between mountain and sea, there is often some boy or girl, with a
more wonderful voice, or a more beautiful face, or a sweeter knack of
song, or a more vivid trick of improvisation than the others; and this
boy or girl strays away some day with a little bundle of clothes, and a
coin or two, or is fetched away by some far-sighted pedlar in such human
wares, who buys them as bird-fanciers buy the finches from the nets; and
then, years and years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indistinctly
of some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated tenor, that the big
world is making happy as kings, and rich as kings' treasurers, and the
people carding the flax or shelling the chestnuts say to one another,
"That was little black Lia, or that was our old Momo;" but Momo or Lia
the village or the vine-field never sees again.

* * *

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive
herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

* * *

Fate will have it so. Fate is so old, and weary of her task; she must
have some diversion. It is Fate who blinded Love for sport, and on the
shoulders of Possession hung the wallet full of stones and
sand--Satiety.

* * *

As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as maternity yet
undreamed of stirs in the maiden; so the love of art comes to the artist
before he can give a voice to his thought or any name to his desire.

Signa heard "beautiful things" as he sat in the rising moonlight, with
the bells of the little bindweed white about his feet.

That was all he could have said.

Wheth