He did not want the grandeur, he did not envy the power which they
had possessed; but he wished that, like them, he could own the Edera
from its rise in the hills to its fall into the sea.

"Oh, dear river!" he sang to it tenderly, "I love you. I love you as
the dragon-flies do, as the wagtails do, as the water voles do; I am
you and you are me. When I lean over you and smile, you smile back to
me. You are beautiful in the night and the morning, when you mirror
the moon and play with the sunbeams, when you are angry under the
wind, and when you are at peace in the heat of the noon. You have
been purple with the blood of my people, and now you are green and
fresh as the leaves of the young vine. You have been black with
powder and battle, now you are fair with the hue of the sky and the
blue of the myosotis. You are the same river as you were a thousand
years ago, and yet you only come down to-day from the high hills,
young and strong, and ever renewing. What is the life of man beside
yours?"

That was the ode which he sang in the dialect of the province, and
the stream washed his feet as he sang; and with his breath on his
long reed flute--the same flute as youths have made and used ever
since the days that Apollo reigned on Saracte--he copied the singing
of the river, which piped as it ran, like birds at dawn.

But this was only at such times as daybreak or early night when he
was alone.

There were but a few people within the ruined walls of Ruscino; most
of the houses were tenantless and tottering to their fall. A few old
bent men and weather-beaten women and naked children climbed its