in there was eternal silence as the sole reply.

* * *

The uneducated are perhaps unjustly judged sometimes. To the ignorant
both right and wrong are only instincts; when one remembers their
piteous and innocent confusion of ideas, the twilight of dim
comprehension in which they dwell, one feels that oftentimes the laws of
cultured men are too hard on them, and that, in a better sense than that
of injustice and reproach, there ought indeed to be two laws for rich
and poor.

* * *

It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.

To a great nature it gives wings that bear it up to heaven; a lower
nature feels it always as a clog that impatiently is dragged only so
long as force compels.

* * *

When the thoughts of youth return, fresh as the scent of new-gathered
blossoms, to the tired old age which has so long forgot them, the coming
of Death is seldom very distant.

* * *

The boat went through the waters swiftly, as the wind blew more
strongly; the sandy shore with its scrub of low-growing rock-rose and
prickly Christ's thorn did not change its landscape, but what she looked
at always was the sea; the sea that in the light had the smiling azure
of a young child's eyes, and when the clouds cast shadows on it, had the
intense impenetrable brilliancy of a jewel.

In the distance were puffs of white and grey, like smoke or mist; those
mists were Corsica and Capraja.

Elba towered close at hand.

Gorgona lay far beyond, with all the other little isles that seem made
to shelter Miranda and Ariel, but of Gorgona she knew nothing; she was
steering straight towards it, but it was many a league distant on the
northerly water.

When she at last stopped her boat in its course she was at the Sasso
Scritto: a favourite resting-place with her, where, on feast-days, when
Joconda let her have liberty from housework and rush-plaiting and
spinning of flax, she always came.

Northward, there was a long smooth level beach of sand, and beyond that
a lagoon where all the waterbirds that love both the sea and the marsh
came in large flocks, and spread their wings over the broad spaces in
which the salt water and the fresh were mingled. Beyond this there were
cliffs of the humid red tufa, and the myrtle and the holy thorn grew
down their sides, and met in summer the fragrant hesperis of the shore.

These cliffs were fine bold bluf