tossing pine-cones in to catch the flames.

In a few minutes a great fire roared alight, the turpentine in the
pine-apples and fir-boughs blazing like pitch. Then he fetched the
barrel of the gun, and the oaken stock, and the silver plates and
mountings, and threw them into the heat.

The flaming wood swallowed them up; he stood and watched it.

After a while a knock came at his house-door.

"Who is there?" he called.

"It is I," said a peasant's voice. "There is so much smoke, I thought
you were on fire. I was on the lower hill, so I ran up--is all right
with you?"

"All is right with me."

"But what is the smoke?"

"I bake my bread."

"It will be burnt to cinders."

"I make it, and I eat it. Whose matter is it?"

The peasant went away muttering, with slow unwilling feet.

Bruno watched the fire.

After a brief time its frenzy spent itself; the flames died down; the
reddened wood grew pale, and began to change to ash; the oaken stock was
all consumed, the silver was melted and fused into shapeless lumps, the
steel tube alone kept shape unchanged, but it was blackened and choked
up with ashes, and without beauty or use.

Bruno watched the fire die down into a great mound of dull grey and
brown charred wood.

Then he went out, and drew the door behind him, and locked it.

The last red rose dropped, withered by the heat.

* * *

There is always song somewhere. As the wine waggon creaks down the hill,
the waggoner will chant to the corn that grows upon either side of him.
As the miller's mules cross the bridge, the lad as he cracks his whip
will hum to the blowing alders. In the red clover, the labourers will
whet their scythes to a trick of melody. In the quiet evenings a Kyrie
Eleison will rise from the thick leaves that hide a village chapel. On
the hills the goatherd, high in air amongst the arbutus branches, will
scatter on the lonely mountain-side stanzas of purest rhythm. By the
sea-shore, where Shelley died, the fisherman, rough and salt and
weather-worn, will string notes of sweetest measure under the
tamarisk-tree on his mandoline. But the poetry and the music float on
the air like the leaves of roses that blossom in a solitude, and drift
away to die upon the breeze; there is no one to notice the fragrance,
there is no one to gather the leaves.

* * *

But then life does not count by years. Some suffer a lifetime in a day,
and so grow old between t