Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/262

250 by the screen. You had only written a few lines, and then given it up; but one of those lines had the power to haunt me. It was this: "O beautiful and beneficent Death!"'

Wilson sat in silence, looking out across the scene at their feet.

A train, running westward towards the dark-blue, vaporous hills and the setting sun, glided slowly away, throwing up a large white plume of smoke, from the greenery that surrounded the village out into the flat, sun-deep, and open plain. It skirted the rippling curve of the bay, so small an object in that vast natural arena, but so restless, so active, vanquishing time and distance. Presently it would pass into the dark tunnel of the hills, and for the moment the lovely and illusive repose of heaven and earth and sea would lie on all things. The bright yellow blossoms of the broom scarcely shivered. The scent of the pines seemed fainter than when it mounted in the gusts of heat radiated from the earth; but it was omnipresent. Not a bird's note from the tree-tops. The quiet was complete. No; one could just hear, far down below, rising and falling, the intermittent sound of a voice singing snatches of a Franco-Italian street-song—the driver, perhaps, humming tunes to himself in the fresh pleasure of the growing cool.