Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/109

97 answered readily, nay, entered upon a regular discourse, to which I played the accompaniment with some pleasure of amusement and otherwise, till we were half way up Primrose Hill: when I all at once remembered a certain bench not far from the top, by which I had on a certain night stood and looked out over the darkness from which came the cool breeze fanning my feverish cheek. Could it have indeed been me, this living, moving, thinking me here, who lived and moved and thought that certain night as memory silently told me that I had? Poor me!

I led her a little round and then up to it. And we sat down upon it together and talked softly.

What thousands and thousands of stars were in the sky! And what millions and millions of people had looked up at the thousands and thousands of stars, and yet would look up, and when would it all ever come to an end?

'Rosy,' I said again, 'does it never seem to you, as if you were here alone in the world, quite alone? I mean, as if nobody else belonged to you somehow; and they are all here, and they live and they die, and you can't tell where they go to: and you can't tell where you will go to, but you don't think you really ever will die, although you know you will; but when you do die, that you will go to somewhere else, where you will be quite alone again and nobody else will belong to you somehow, and they will be all there, and they will all live there, and then die, and you can't tell where they go to, and then you will die.… And it goes on like that for ever!—Did you never think of it in that way?'

'I never thought about it at all,' she said, 'but I like to hear you talk like that.… Go on.'

I started and laughed, and then said:

'Now I'll tell you a little piece of poetry, a merry little piece, and then we must be going home; for it's getting late.'

She composed herself to listen.

'It's in Greek,' I said, 'but, you'll be able to understand it. I'll tell you about it, first. It's called a Swallow Song. The little boys sang it in Greece when the swallows came back after the winter. They used to go