Page:Crawford - Love in idleness.djvu/27

 as it were, has sketched an evil dream of mediævalism, incoherent with itself and with the very commonplace facts of the village street. There, also, in Mr. Bee's shop window, are plainly visible the more or less startling covers of the newest books, while from on high, frowns down the counterfeit presentment of battlements and turrets, and of such terrors as lent like interest when novels were not, neither was the slightest idea of the short story yet conceived.

But behind all and above all rise the wooded hills, which are neither modern nor ancient, but eternal. And in them and through them there is secret sweetness, and fragrance, and much that is gentle and lovely—in the heart of the defiantly beautiful earth-woman with her cold face, far beyond the reach of her tide-lover, and altogether out of hearing of his sighs and complaining speeches. There grow in endless greenness the white pines and the pitch pines, the black spruce and the white; there droops the feathery larch by the creeping yew, and there gleam the birches, yellow, white, and grey; the sturdy red oak spreads his arms to the scarlet