Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/225

 like red plumes; everywhere there was a sea of reed-grass and rushes murmurous with clouds of insects; a watery desert where disease walked abroad alike by noonday and by night.

A narrow road, often raised on piles, crossed the morass, and oftentimes a false step of the oxen to right or left would have plunged the waggon into the bog on either side that was hidden under the rank vegetation of grass and rushes. This single road traversed the marshes, and united them with the great fields of grain that lay beyond, square leagues of corn stretching far as the eyes could reach from sea to mountains, and now brown and bending to the sickle.

Before they entered on these great corn lands where harvest was ending mirthfully, despite the pestilence that rode on every sunbeam, the men stayed their tired and beaten oxen, who, footsore and with the water falling from their eyes, would, pressed longer, have dropped down to rise no more.

Then, and then only, they bethought them to look at their burden; as they would have looked at the heifer to see that