Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 3).djvu/98

 faloes and the roebucks wandered through seas of flower-foam; the honeysuckle garlanded the straight pine-stems, and the cerulean clusters of the mouse-ear and the deep green fans of the nymphæa began to spread themselves between the sky and the little merry fish and the ever-chaunting frogs that filled with noise the silence of the pools and streams. All the earth was running over with foliage and blossoms and young new-born things, as the week-old fawns slept beneath the acanthus shade, and the colts gambolled on the velvet softness of the mossy glades, and the pretty little foxes ran out of their earths in the moss-covered sandstone, and the yet prettier leverets stole in their mother's wake across a bed of hyacinths blue as the sky.

The cuckoo called from the leafy heights of the esculus-oaks, and all night long the nightingale told the rosemary that she had seen nothing sweeter than itself in Egypt or in Palestine; for it is the rosemary rather than the rose that Philomel loves best.

Sometimes, when Musa came up from the shadow of the tombs into all that abounding light, that universal fragrance, that immense sense of life and loveliness, in