basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the
open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it
were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key.
The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles,
some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The junipers--looking, in their
soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone
seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and
rain--are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite
minuteness. And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like
misbegotten yew-trees! The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so
peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man
might live fifty years in England and not see.

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a
pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and
pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the
dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the
shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the
poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves
that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that
remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat
of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of a forest
savour.

"You can get up now," says the painter; "I'm at the background."

And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood,
the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching
farther into the open. A cool air comes along the highways, and the
scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad their ozone. Out of unknown
thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not
like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had
known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer
evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon
the woodland winds. One side of the long avenues is still kindled with
the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow. Over the trees the
west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their
chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.

A PLEASURE-PART