Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 2).djvu/219

 been forest and marsh, and grass and water, and the vast quadrupeds had moved with massive measure through the woods that no axe touched, in the twilight that no hearth fires lit, in the green virgin wastes that had no sound but the tread of their mighty feet, the trumpet of their solemn voices; and man, when he did at length come amidst them, had been a small, and timid, and puny creature, glad to profit by the branches the elephants broke down, grateful to follow the course of the hippopotamus along the shores of the brimming rivers, meekly and humbly culling the fruits the great lords of the soil did not need. She wished that she had lived then to have been friends with the huge leaf-eating beasts. She sorrowed for them, driven away little by little off the soil they reigned over as man multiplied and climate changed, until at the last they perished utterly, as ages after them the Etruscan people did in turn.

He told her all these stories, that are written in fragments in ivory letters on the heart of the earth, when he was in the mood to speak in the long evenings that now approached as the winds drove the last leaves from the maple and ash, and