Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/218

 pines for fuel, she thought of the tree laid low in symbol of lost Attis, and borne garlanded with flowers to the shrine of the Mighty Mother.

And when he told her that all this Etruscan and Latin life had been lived long ere the Galilean gathered his disciples from the fishers of the lake side; and that before this yet again, in long ages ere the Italiote or the Tyrrhene had turned a sod of the soil of Maremma, all these green, wet, shining woodlands and red blossoming grasslands had been the haunt of the meridional elephant, of the armoured rhinoceros, of the terrible machairodus, of the huge hippopotamus, and, later than that, of the mammoth and the lion and the bear coming down over the Alps as the Goths did after them—then her eager imagination, starved so long, fed itself on all these wonders with entranced delight, and he who told her of them seemed to her a magician as marvellous in power as the Etruscan aruspice had seemed to the Etruscan slave.

Of all the tales what fascinated her the most were those of that prehistoric time when all the Tuscan valleys and plains had