atural beauty which made Linnaeus fall on
his knees before the English gorse and thank God for having made so
beautiful a thing.

Her sympathies and her imaginings spent themselves in solitary song as
she made the old strings of the lute throb in low cadence when she sat
solitary by her hearth on the rock floor of the grave; and out of doors
her eyes filled and her lips laughed when she wandered through the leafy
land and found the warbler's nest hung upon the reeds, or the first
branching asphodel in flower. She could not have told why these made her
happy, why she could watch for half a day untired the little wren
building where the gladwyn blossomed on the water's edge. It was only
human life that hurt her, embittered her, and filled her with hatred of
it.

As she walked one golden noon by the Sasso Scritto, clothed with its
myrtle and thyme and its quaint cacti that later would bear their purple
heads of fruit; the shining sea beside her, and above her the bold
arbutus-covered heights, with the little bells of the sheep sounding on
their sides, she saw a large fish, radiant as a gem, with eyes like
rubies. Some men had it; a hook was in its golden gills, and they had
tied its tail to the hook so that it could not stir, and they had put it
in a pail of water that it might not die too quickly, die ere they could
sell it. A little further on she saw a large green and gold snake, one
of the most harmless of all earth's creatures, that only asked to creep
into the sunshine, to sleep in its hole in the rock, to live out its
short, innocent life under the honey smile of the rosemary; the same men
stoned it to death, heaping the pebbles and broken sandstone on it, and
it perished slowly in long agony, being large and tenacious of life. Yet
a little further on, again, she saw a big square trap of netting, with a
blinded chaffinch as decoy. The trap was full of birds, some fifty or
sixty of them, all kinds of birds, from the plain brown minstrel,
beloved of the poets, to the merry and amber-winged oriole, from the
dark grey or russet-bodied fly-catcher and whinchat to the glossy and
handsome jay, cheated and caught as he was going back to the north; they
had been trapped, and would be strung on a string and sold for a copper
coin the dozen; and of many of them the wings or the legs were broken
and the eyes were already dim. The men who had taken them were seated on
the thymy turf grinning like apes, with pipes in their mouth