Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/315

 and dreaming in the wintry sunshine on the sands; they were the flamingoes.

some of them live all the year round here, as in Sicily or Sardinia, but these are not numerous; in large numbers they only arrive in the cold weather, to depart on the wings of the first March wind.

Though they are so shy of human eyes, she had seen them ever since she had been old. enough to come here, and she had always fancied that they were half flower half bird; no heart of a June rose or cluster of rose-laurel blossoms has ever more lovely crimsons, more delicate flush of colour, than the phœnicopterus roseus of Egypt and of Asia. Flying, the flamingoes are like a sunset cloud; walking, they are like slender spirals of flame traversing the curling foam. When one looks on them across black lines of storm-blown reeds on a November morning in the marshes, as their long throats twist in the air with the flexile motion of the snake, the grace of a lily blown by wind, one thinks of Thebes, of Babylon, of the gorgeous Persia of Xerxes, of the lascivious Egypt of the Ptolemies.

The world has grown grey and joyless in the twilight of age and fatigue, but these