Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/331

 where the salt club-marsh and the pungent sea-rush throve, which have defied and made the despair of all engineering skill from the days of the Etruscans; and Musa grew well acquainted with him on the soaked sand where the many streams of her moorland trickled together, and formed, with the in-running sea, a broad, shining, reedy mere—the breeding-place of many a noxious vapour, but the delight of her and of the birds.

When the asphodel was all golden and white over the green deserts of Southern Maremma, and she left the sea-shore for the inland charm of fresh-born vegetation, and the undergrowth was like snow with the laurestinus flowers, and the thyme and the basil began to be dewy and fragrant underneath her feet, she found the fieldfares that had come from Nubian sands, and the tiny flycatcher that was putting on his ruby coat for spring-time and for courting, and the song-sparrow busy building his high nest in some solitary pine and lining it solidly with bark-fibre or with fish scales, and the bush-singer hanging his upon a branch of thorn or under close leaves of myrtle, and the red-breasted shrike darting on butterflies and