d; the tears came into his closing eyes as though he
looked on the dead face of a familiar friend.

He felt the home sickness of the exile, of the wanderer who knows not
where to lay his head.

The glory was gone from the city.

Its greatness was but as a ghost that glided through its deserted
streets calling in vain on dead men to arise.

The rough red sail of the fishing-boat was alone on the waters once
crowded with the silken sails of gilded galleys; the toad croaked and
the stork made her nest where the Lords of Gonzaga had gone forth to
meet their brides of Este or of Medici; Virgil, Alboin, great Karl,
Otho, Petrarca, Ariosto, had passed by here over this world of waters
and become no more than dreams; and the vapours and the dust together
had stolen the smile from Giulio's Psyche, and the light from Mantegna's
arabesques. On the vast walls the grass grew, and in the palaces of
princes the winds wandered and the beggars slept. All was still,
disarmed, lonely, forgotten; left to a silence like the silence of the
endless night of death. Yet it was dear to him; this sad and stately
city, waiting for the slow death of an unpitied and lingering decay.

It was dear to him from habit, from birth, from memory, from affinity,
as the reeds of its stagnant waters were dear to the sedge-warbler that
hung its slender nest on the stem of a rush. A price was set on his
head; and never more, he thought, would he see the sunshine in ripples
of gold come over the grey lagoons.

* * *

No one cared; the terrible, barren, acrid truth, that science trumpets
abroad as though it were some new-found joy, touched her ignorance with
its desolating despair. No one cared. Life was only sustained by death.
The harmless and lovely children of the air and of the moor were given
over, year after year, century after century, to the bestial play and
the ferocious appetites of men. The wondrous beauty of the earth renewed
itself only to be the scene of endless suffering, of interminable
torture. The human tyrant, without pity, greedy as a child, more brutal
than the tiger in his cruelty, had all his way upon the innocent races
to which he begrudged a tuft of reeds, a palm's breadth of moss or sand.
The slaughter, the misery, the injustice, renewed themselves as the
greenness of the world did. No one cared. There was no voice upon the
blood-stained waters. There was no rebuke from the offended heavens. To
all prayer or pa