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Rh reviving moisture, and wear fresher verdure and livelier hues; the perfume which they exhale makes the very breathing a delight—so sweet is the cool and fragrant air: while the birds flutter to and fro, as if they, too, shared the general enjoyment.

The sun soon broke forth from that one dark cloud, gradually melting into light; and the sunbeams and the glittering rain went driving together through the forest glades—those long vistas, of which the slender deer seemed the sole habitants. Yet the gaze of the young Italians rather turned to the white windings of the smoke, which marked the site of the gipsies' fire, and recalled so many associations of their childhood and their country. Light—transitory—winding its graceful circles, till finally lost in the blue air, born of the fiery element which smoulders below, smoke is the very type of that vapour of the human heart, hope. So does hope spring from the burning passions, which consume their home and themselves—so does it wander through the future, making its own charmed path—and so does it evanish away: lost in the horizon, it grows at last too faint for outline.

But Francesca, who perceived that the heavy drops were beginning to ooze through the thick