Slowly and carefully she read on till she gave a little cry and nearly fell off the work-box in her excitement.
"The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea—
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free."
The long quest was at an end.
The poem that her father had chanted as he used to carry her about, was found.
She jumped off the work-box on to the floor, and sat down upon it, leaning her back against the book-case.
The tears were wet on her cheeks as she read, and her breath came quickly as though she had been running. She was deeply moved. She repeated the lines softly, whispering them to herself, sometimes mispronouncing the long words but ever vividly and intensely alive to the music of the measure, to the nobility of the conception, to the tragic dignity of its expression.
The dew of genius had fallen upon the thought, and the words bloomed again in their fiery beauty for this small, unlettered girl, who, with something of the spirit of old Greece, sat weeping over the wonder of it.
Over and over again she read those sixteen verses, till she heard her aunt calling her to come to dinner, and, carrying the precious work with her, she darted upstairs to her bedroom, hid it in a drawer, and rushed down again in a tumult of excitement that could find no outlet.
"You've got a cold, Jane-Anne," said Mrs. Dew as she carved the joint. "Your nose is red an' you're sniffling."
Jane-Anne did not explain. The imputation must be borne.