Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/62

 up on the mountains since her girlhood, sixty and more years before in the alps about the feet of the Becca di Nona. The sight of the great cones of snow so near beside her, the feeling of the crisp clear air and the icy freshness of it, gave her a strange sensation—the sickness of nostalgia coming on her in old age, after a long life in the swamps and on the shore.

A sudden thirst made her throat and her heart ache with longing for her old home, set on a granite ledge of rock, with the valley of Cogne stretching below it, and the white summit of Mont Blanc in sight beyond the gorge, and nearer at hand the peaks and glaciers of the Grand Paradis, her old home, with its girdle of deep green forest, and its ceaseless sound of rushing water, and its alpine winds, that are known no more to the dwellers of the plains than what the condor of the Andes beholds in its flight is known to the hedge-sparrow in the thorn-bush by the road.

It was sixty long years since she had felt that wind upon her forehead, and heard that rush of ice-fed waters as they leapt from rock to rock; since she had lifted her voice in the jödel of the hills, and rested