Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/299

 as any dog-fox that had burrowed there from the time it had been a cub. The map of all this wild country was clear in his brain, and all that the prisons had done to him had not made one memory fainter of all that labyrinth of foliage, all that desert of green pasture, all those untrodden hillsides, all those barren moors silent as Sahara.

As a child he had run through them barefoot, light-hearted as the scampering goats; as a man he had ridden over them, trodden through them, hidden there, fought there, there loved and hated, and there called with one shrill whistle a score of his men from bush and briar. Until the iron heel of that great gaoler Death should stamp his brain out into nothingness, he would remember every wind of the dizzy path up the face of the rocks, every spring that coursed through the moss and the ling, every hole to hide in where the wild olive grew with the holy-thorn above the ruddy travertine or the yellow sandstone.

So he dreamt not of descending to the sea-shore, but held on his way inland; whilst the Apennines that had given him shelter so long behind their ramparts of