thread-like masts,
that told where the distant town hugged its narrow harbor; and, in the
opposite direction, low, irregular sand hills and brown marshes crept
southward, as if hunting the warmth that alone could mantle them with
living verdure.

As the afternoon wore away, the sinking sun dipped suddenly behind a
wooded eminence, which, losing the warm purples it had worn since
noon, grew chill and blue as his rays departed; and, weary of her
work, Salome put it aside and began to practise her music lesson,
beating time with her slender fingers on the bare juniper-roots, from
which wind and rain had driven the soil. Running her chromatic scales,
and pausing at will to trill upon any minor note that wooed her
vagrant fancy, she played with her flexible voice as dexterous
violinists toy with the obedient strings they hold in harmonious
bondage to their bows.

Finally she pushed the exercises away, and began a _fantasus_ from
"Traviata," which she had heard Mr. Barilli play several times; and so
absorbed was she in testing her capacity for vocal gymnastics that she
failed to observe the moving figure dwarfed by distance and pacing the
sands in front of "Solitude."

The rich, fresh tones which seemed occasionally to tremble with the
excess of melody that burdened them played hide-and-seek among the
hills, startling whole choruses of deep-throated echoes, and attending
and retentive ocean, catching the strains on her beryl strings, bore
them whither--and how far? To palm-plumed equatorial isles, where
dying auricular nerves mistook them for seraphic utterances? To
toiling mariners, tossed helplessly by fierce typhoons, who, pausing
in their scramble for spars, listened to the weird melody that
presaged woe and wreck? To the broken casements of fishermen's huts,
on distant shores, where anxious wives peered out in the blackening
tempest, and shrank back appalled by sounds which sea-tradition
averred were born in coral caves, mosaiced with blanching human
skulls? What hoary hierophant in the mysteries of cataphonics and
diacoustics will undertake to track those trills across the blue bosom
of the Atlantic or the purplish billows of the Indian Ocean?

The wind went down with the sun; silver-edged cirri lost their
glitter, and swift was

... "The spread
Of orange lustre through these azure spheres
Where little clouds lie still like flocks of sheep,
Or vessels sailing in God's other deep."