claimed Genestas. "Let us wait a moment."

A distant sound of singing came to their ears.

"Is it a woman or a man, or is it a bird?" asked the commandant in a low
voice. "Is it the voice of this wonderful landscape?"

"It is something of all these things," the doctor answered, as he
dismounted and fastened his horse to a branch of a poplar tree.

He made a sign to the officer to follow his example and to come with
him. They went slowly along a footpath between two hedges of blossoming
hawthorn which filled the damp evening air with its delicate fragrance.
The sun shone full into the pathway; the light and warmth were very
perceptible after the shade thrown by the long wall of poplar trees; the
still powerful rays poured a flood of red light over a cottage at the
end of the stony track. The ridge of the cottage roof was usually a
bright green with its overgrowth of mosses and house-leeks, and the
thatch was brown as a chestnut shell, but just now it seemed to be
powdered with a golden dust. The cottage itself was scarcely visible
through the haze of light; the ruinous wall, the doorway and everything
about it was radiant with a fleeting glory and a beauty due to chance,
such as is sometimes seen for an instant in a human face, beneath the
influence of a strong emotion that brings warmth and color into it. In
a life under the open sky and among the fields, the transient and tender
grace of such moments as these draws from us the wish of the apostle who
said to Jesus Christ upon the mountain, "Let us build a tabernacle and
dwell here."

The wide landscape seemed at that moment to have found a voice whose
purity, and sweetness equaled its own sweetness and purity, a voice as
mournful as the dying light in the west--for a vague reminder of Death
is divinely set in the heavens, and the sun above gives the same warning
that is given here on earth by the flowers and the bright insects of the
day. There is a tinge of sadness about the radiance of sunset, and the
melody was sad. It was a song widely known in the days of yore, a ballad
of love and sorrow that once had served to stir a national hatred of
France for England. Beaumarchais, in a later day, had given it back its
true poetry by adapting it for the French theatre and putting it into
the mouth of a page, who pours out his heart to his stepmother. Just
now it was simply the air that rose and fell. There were no words; the
plaintive voice of the singer touched and thri