Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/323

 warm, thick, woollen clothes made of lamb's wool that Joconda had woven for her; and at night, when rain, like the rain of the tropics, poured on the sandstone rock that made her roof, and was sweeping in sheets of water over Maremma from mountain to sea, she span at her wheel, as Tanaquil had done before her, by the low light of one oil wick burning in the lofty candelabra whose like had charmed the delicate and lofty taste of Sappho's Hellas.

Sometimes a snow-storm would sweep over the moors and the sea; sometimes the broad lagoon, formed where the marsh waters joined the salt pools in the sand, was one mass of boiling, wind-lashed, turgid, yellow froth; sometimes thunder rolled and blue lightning flamed above the bare peaks and crags of the easterly mountains, and a darkness that could be felt descended at noontide on Maremma as on the land of the plagues; sometimes, rarest of all, there was the film of frost on all the moors, and the terns and smews had to tap with their bills at a sheet of ice on their tarns and streams, and fancied themselves back in their own Greenland or Siberia.

But rough weather, and wet weather,