fs, and one of them had been called from
time immemorial the Sasso Scritto,--why, no one knew; the only writing
on it was done by the hand of Nature. It was steep and lofty; on its
summit were the ruins of an old fortress of the middle ages; its sides
were clothed with myrtle, aloe, and rosemary, and at its feet were
boulders of marble, rose and white in the sun; rock pools, with
exquisite network of sunbeams crossing their rippling surface, and
filled with green ribbon-grasses and red sea-foliage, and shining gleams
of broken porphyry, and pieces of agate and cornelian.

The yellow sands hereabouts were bright just now with the sea-daffodil,
and the sea-stocks, which would blossom later, were pricking upward to
the Lenten light; great clusters of southern-wood waved in the wind, and
the pungent sea-rush grew in long lines along the shore, where the
sand-piper was dropping her eggs, and the blue-rock was carrying dry
twigs and grass to his home in the ruins above or the caverns beneath,
and the stock-doves in large companies were winging their way over sea
towards the Maritime or the Pennine Alps.

This was a place that Musa loved, and she would come here and sit for
hours, and watch the roseate cloud of the returning flamingoes winging
their way from Sardinia, and the martins busy at their masonry in the
cliffs, and the Arctic longipennes going away northward as the weather
opened, and the stream-swallows hunting early gnats and frogs on the
water, and the kingfisher digging his tortuous underground home in the
sand. Here she would lie for hours amongst the rosemary, and make silent
friendships with the populations of the air, while the sweet blue sky
was above her head, and the sea, as blue, stretched away till it was
lost in light.

Once up above, on these cliffs, the eye could sweep over the sea north
and south, and the soil was more than ever scented with that fragrant
and humble blue-flowered shrub of which the English madrigals and glees
of the Stuart and Hanoverian poets so often speak, and seem to smell.
Behind the cliffs stretched moorland, marshes, woodland, intermingled,
crossed by many streams, holding many pools, blue-fringed in May with
iris, and osier beds, and vast fields of reeds, and breadths of forest
with dense thorny underwood, where all wild birds came in their season,
and where all was quiet save for a bittern's cry, a boar's snort, a
snipe's scream, on the lands once crowded with the multitude