Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/48

42 wild and smother the earth, growing like weeds out of its fertile surface. Then, missing the check of authority, they grow wanton, embracing and strangling each other at will. Here and there, where some such colony has escaped from mastership, the bushes bud and fade again without making any one the richer – as for instance on that lonely spot, where the roses year after year for a long time past have dropped their petals unheeded upon each other, having no other duty to fulfil than to put out their flowers as every June comes round, and weave a fantastic garland around an old man's grave.

But those escaped slaves are few. These acres of roses around are all under the yoke; and they are having their hardest time now, for it is late in the rose season, and the cutters are at work. They are to be seen in the fields using their knives mercilessly, and they are to be met on the road, coming along in the dust, bending under the load of flowers which heap the basket-casks on their backs, and staring sideways and open-mouthed at the unusual sight of a travelling-carriage jogging slowly along. There is such a profusion of roses this year, that no one cares if the heap shakes with each step, now and then dropping a rose head in the dust, from where the children pick them up and play with them gleefully.

A rose burden is not necessarily a light burden, thinks Gretchen, as she watches the toil-worn faces of the laden peasant-women; and though it may perhaps be pleasanter to prick one's fingers with rose-thorns than with needles, that does not make the scratches in their hands less unsightly.

It is a hot day, but a day without sunshine. The hard glare of light, the dazzling brightness of blue sky, which Gretchen has been used to for many days past, is gone to-day. There is an even greyness over the low hanging sky, stretching away, unbroken and unshaded, until over there in the far west, where thunder broods in the lead-blue, metal-hued clouds, and grumbles out a faint but sullen warning, with long intervals of dead silence between. There is no breeeze to carry about the scent of roses on the air: it hangs heavily over the fields, intense but unrefreshing, weighing on the senses and mingling with the breath of every evil-smelling thing, which disfigures the street of each squalid village the travellers have passed. It is strange to find one's self thus freed again from the imprisonment of the Djernis valley. The wide sky looks foreign to Gretchen, and the flat country has an. uncongenial vacancy after those rocks and forests they have left behind them. They had passed by many rows of hovels, called villages; and they had passed one or two solitary buildings, standing in the middle of flat fields, and scarcely shaded by acacia-trees, and these were called country-houses. They were all long and low, and each had an appanage of small out-buildings; some of them were better and some of them worse. Some of them bore the stamp of poverty upon their doors and windows and the rude planking which fenced them in; others betrayed signs of rude opulence in their open granaries overflowing with Indian corn.

"Wait till you see Draskócs!" said Ascelinde, with suppressed triumph in her tone, each time that they passed one of these solitary white houses. Not one of them even distantly approached the picture in Ascelinde's mind: they all were pale and shadowy beside the vision which, with every moment and with every yard of