d end to end. These facts are also
familiar to everyone beforehand, and they present a solid basis for
gregarious conversation. They put the merest stranger at his ease. They
make one feel at home.

Some of the trades and professions secure the same object by special
phrases. When you hear that the horses are fat as butter, the men keen
as mustard, and everything right as rain, you know you are back to the
army again. The kindly mention of the Great Lexicographer, the Wizard of
the North, the Sage of Chelsea, and London's Particular calls up the
vision of a street descending into the vale of St. Paul's. But such
phrases are fleeting. They hardly last four generations of mankind, and
already they wither to decay. "Every cloud has a silver lining," "It's a
poor heart that never rejoices," "There are as good fish in the sea as
ever were caught"--those are the observations that give stability and
permanence to the intercourse of man. They are not clever; they contain
no paradox; like the Ugly Duckling, they cannot emit sparks. But one's
heart leaps up at hearing them, as at the sight of a rainbow. For, like
the rainbow, they are an assurance that while the earth remaineth,
seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night,
shall never cease.

XXIX

THE PRIEST OF NEMI

Here it is cool under thick alders, close to the water's edge, where
frogs are doing their very best to sing. Hidden in some depth of the
sky, the Dog Star rages, and overhead the mid-day sun marches across his
blazing barrack-square. Far away the heathen violently rage; the world
is full of rumours of war, and the kings of the earth take counsel
together against liberty and peace. But here under thick alders it is
cool, and the deep water of the lake that lies brooding within the
silent crater of these Alban hills, stretches before us an unruffled
surface of green and indigo profoundly mingled. Wandering about among
overgrown and indistinguishable gardens under the woods, women and girls
are gathering strawberries and loading them up in great wicker baskets
for the market of Rome. The sound of sawing comes from a few old houses
by the lake-side, that once were mills turned by the nymph Egeria's
stream, where Ovid drank. Opposite, across the lake, on the top of the
old crater's edge, stands a brown village--the church tower, unoccupied
"palace," huddled walls and roofs piled up the steep, as Italian
villages are made. That is