Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/324

 were the portion rather of autumn than of winter, and for the most part the sun shone above the Arctic birds that had come southward for shelter, and upon the child of Saturnino gathering the fallen wood off the moor, or driving her little boat through surf and spray. The winter-time was short—shorter than counted by the solstice—for by the turn of the new year the corn was springing and covering, like a thin green cloud, all the vast plains to the north; and on the yet vaster grass lands, where no foot of a ploughman or hand of a mower was ever known, under the gauze veil of the rime frost, the bulbs of the wild crocus and the wild narcissus began to feel their trustful way upward through the earth like little children timid in the dark, yet confident because they think that God is near.

Then, in those still, starlit nights, cleared by the magic wand of the frost till all the lustrous sky seemed alive with throbbing light, Musa would leave her hearth and lamp and go up into the air, and stand and look at the silent procession of those distant worlds of which none had ever told her anything.

She had no conception what they were.