s, and a
flask of wine between their knees.

She passed on, helpless.

She thought of words that Joconda had once quoted to her, words which
said that men were made in God's likeness!

* * *

While it is winter the porphyrion sails down the willowy streams beside
the sultan-hen that is to be his love, and sees her not, and stays not
her passage upon the water or through the air; she does not live as yet
to him. But when the breath of the spring brings the catkins from the
willows, and the violets amidst the wood-moss on the banks, then he
awakes and beholds her; and then the stream reflects but her shape for
him, and the rushes are full of the melody of his love-call. It was
still winter with Este--a bitter winter of discontent; and he had no
eyes for this water-bird that swam with him through the icy current of
his adversity.

To break the frozen flood that imprisoned him was his only thought.

* * *

Air is the king of physicians; he who stands often with nothing between
him and the open heavens will gain from them health both moral and
physical.

* * *

"Yes; you have a right to know. After all, it was ruin to me, but it is
not much of a story; a tale-teller with his guitar on a vintage night
would soon make a better one. I loved a woman. She lived in Mantua. So
did I, too. For her sake I lost three whole years--three years of the
best of my life. And yet, what is gain except love, and what better than
joy can we have? A pomegranate is ripe but once. And I--my pomegranate
is rotten for evermore! We lived in Mantua. It is a strange sad place.
It was great and gay enough once. Grander pomp than Mantua's there was
never known in Italy. Felix Mantua!--and now it is all decaying,
mouldering, sinking, fading; it is silent as death; the mists, the
waters, the empty palaces, the walls that the marshes are eating little
by little every day, the grass and the moss and the wild birds' nests on
the roofs, on the temples, on the bridges, all are desolate in Mantua
now. Yet is it beautiful in its loneliness, when the sunrise comes over
the seas of reeds, and the towers and the arches are reflected in the
pools and streams; and yet again at night, when the moon is high and the
lagoons are as sheets of silver, and the shadows come and go over the
bulrushes and St. Andrea lifts itself against the stars. Yes; then it is
still Mantova la Gloriosa."

His voice droppe