Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HYACINTHS AND HONORINE UNDER le Berceau, upon her own terraced hill of vine and olive, lies the little mountain village of Castellar, nigh Menton. In the midst extends an open space about an elm; to the south and north stand houses, and their fretted stucco of many faint and blended colours, their green and blue shutters, dark windows and mellow roofs mingle in a colour harmony as proper to its environment of hills and orchards and crags, as the nest of the bird to the lichened bough, or the coat of the sand coloured lion to his lair. A street opens out of the Place de la Mairie, and here shadows merge delici ously and the little windows aloft stare into each other's eyes. Sunshine breaks through and burns where some scarlet or yellow rag flutters from a casement. Dark stairways wind on either side. Sometimes they ascend and sometimes abruptly fall under the netted loops of the earthquake arches, until at the end, set in low, dim halos of darkness, shine light and leaves, and the eternal olive glitters silvery and whispers like rain. The street seems marked with sharp parallel lines that drop abruptly from tiles to cobble stones. The walls are brokenand the plaster has fallen in patches upon which seeds have found foothold. Pellitory of the wall prospers in every niche and breaks the lines of the buildings with bosses and traceries of dull green. Silence reigns here, and faint, evil scents haunt the gloom; but the end of the street lies open, shines full of light and abounds with life and sound. A fountain spouts one glittering thread into a stone basin at this point, and the water purrs gently w'ith a pleasant sound. Above the trough archways leap and carry sunshine across great shadows; between the houses le Berceau's enormous bulk slopes upward and springs out of the terrac...
|
