table or the
sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly over a pipe and a
tumbler of wine. Or sometimes--suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the
court from out the half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by
day, and the light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow
under every vine leaf on the wall--sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a
basket made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the long
alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-trees, with
every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there
a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede us and sound
many a jolly flourish as they walk. We gather ferns and dry boughs into
the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old
bandits' haunt, and shows shapely beards and comely faces and toilettes
ranged about the wall. The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent
round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song
and jest. And then we go home in the moonlight morning, straggling a
good deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called
together again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one
of the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes
grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die finally out, and still
walks on in the strange coolness and silence and between the crisp
lights and shadows of the moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings
out the hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone.
No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the
busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue
to human ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in
his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly
silent that it seems to him he might hear the church-bells ring the hour
out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away in
outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his childhood
passed between the sun and flowers.

IDLE HOURS

The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to be
understood until you can compare them with the woods by day. The
stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees t