of their
ancestors, and every grain of that soil had been watered with the sweat
of their brows, and become charged with dear and intimate recollections.

Previously there had joined the party a woman who, tall and straight,
had had breasts as flat as a board, and jawbones like the jawbones of a
horse, and a glance in her dull, sidelong black eyes like a gleaming,
smouldering fire.

And every evening this woman had been wont to step outside the barraque
with the woman in the yellow scarf and to seat herself on a rubbish
heap, and, resting her cheeks on the palms of her hands, and inclining
her head sideways, to sing in a high and shrewish voice:

Behind the graveyard wall,
Where fair green bushes stand.
I'll spread me on the sand
A shroud as white as snow.
And not long will it be
Before my heart's adored,
My master and my lord,
Shall answer my curtsey low.

Usually her companion, the woman in the yellow scarf, had, with head
bent forward and eyes fixed upon her stomach, remained silent; but on
rare, unexpected occasions she had, in the hoarse, sluggish voice of a
peasant, sung a song with the sobbing refrain:

Ah, my beloved, sweetheart of mine,
Never again will these eyes seek thine!

Nor amid the stifling blackness of the southern night had these voices
ever failed to bring back to my memory the snowy wastes of the North,
and the icy, wailing storm-wind, and the distant howling of unseen
wolves.

In time, the squint-eyed woman had been taken ill of a fever, and
removed to the town in a tilted ambulance; and as she had lain
quivering and moaning on the stretcher she had seemed still to be
singing her little ditty about the graveyard and the sand.

The head with the yellow scarf rose, dipped, and disappeared.

After I had finished my breakfast I thatched the honey-pot with some
leaves, fastened down the lid, and indolently resumed my way in the
wake of the party, my blackthorn staff tiptapping against the hard
tread of the track as I proceeded.

The track loomed--a grey, narrow strip--before me, while on my right
the restless, dark blue sea had the air of being ceaselessly planed by
thousands of invisible carpenters; so regularly did the stress of a
wind as moist and sweet and warm as the breath of a healthy woman cause
ever-rustling curls of foam to drift towards the beach. Also, careening
on to its port quarter under a full set of bellying sails, a Turkish
felucca was gliding towa