s that gave
the eagle of Persia and the brazen trumpets of Lydia to the legions of
Rome.

Under their thickets of the prickly sloe-tree and the sweet-smelling bay
lay the winding ways of buried cities; their runlets of water rippled
where kings and warriors slept beneath the soil, and the yellow marsh
lily, and the purple and the rose of the wind-flower and the
pasque-flower, and the bright red of the Easter tulips, and the white
and the gold of the asphodels, and the colours of a thousand other rarer
and less homelike blossoms, spread their innocent glory in their turn to
the sky and the breeze, above the sunken stones of courts and gates and
palaces and prisons.

These moors were almost as solitary as the deserts are.

Now and then against the blue of the sky and the brown of the wood,
there rose the shapes of shepherds and their flocks; now and then herds
of young horses went by, fleet and unconscious of their doom; now and
then the sound of a rifle cracked the silence of the windless air; but
these came but seldom.

Maremma is wide, and its people are scattered.

In autumn and in winter, hunters, shepherds, swineherds, sportsmen,
birdcatchers, might spoil the solemn peace of these moors, but in spring
and summer no human soul was seen upon them. The boar and the buffalo,
the flamingo and the roebuck, the great plover and the woodcock, reigned
alone.

* * *

"They say he sang too well, and that was why they burnt him," said
Andreino to her to-day, after telling her for the hundredth time of what
he had seen once on the Ligurian shore, far away yonder northward, when
he, who knew nothing of Adonais or Prometheus, had been called, a stout
seafaring man in that time, amongst other peasants of the country-side,
to help bring in the wood for a funeral pyre by the sea.

He had known nought of the songs or the singer, but he loved to tell the
tale he had heard then; and say how he had seen, he himself, with his
own eyes, the drowned poet burn, far away yonder where the pines stood
by the sea, and how the flames had curled around the heart that men had
done their best to break, and how it had remained unburnt in the midst,
whilst all the rest drifted in ashes down the wind. He knew nought of
the Skylark's ode, and nought of the Cor Cordium; but the scene by the
seashore had burned itself as though with flame into his mind, and he
spoke of it a thousand times if once, sitting by the edge of the se