Now was I under the spell of that ancient life which had held him thralled to his very end. Mine were but meagre vistas, it is true, but I caught such glimpses of marble beauty through the pergola of Time, as made me a little proud of my far-sightedness. Seated with Dove and Letitia beneath a favorite oak, half-way up Sun Dial, I discoursed learnedly, as I supposed, only to find that in classic lore the poet's daughter was better versed than I. She brightened visibly at the sound of ancient names; they had been the music of her father's world, and from earliest childhood she had listened to it. Seated upon the grass, I, the school-boy, expounded text-book notes. She, the daughter of "Old David Homer," as Butters called him, told us bright tales of gods and heroes, nymphs and flowers and the sailing clouds shell-pink in the setting sun. They had been to her what Mother Goose and Robinson Crusoe had been to me; they had been her fairy stories, told her at eve ere she went to bed; and now as she told them, an eager winsomeness crept upon her, her voice was sweeter, her face was glorified with something of that roseate light in which her scenes were laid; she was a child again, and Dove and I, listening, were children with her, asking more.
She sat bolt-upright while she romanced for us. I lay prone before her with my chin upon my hands, nibbling grass-stalks. Dove, like Letitia, sat upon the turf, now gazing raptly with her round brown eyes at the story-teller's face, now gazing off at the purple woodland distance or at Grassy Ford's white spires among the elms below.
"Why, Letty, you're a poetess," Dove once said, so breathlessly that Letitia laughed. "And I," Dove added, "why, I don't know a single story."
"Why should you know one?" replied Letitia, pinching Dove's rueful face. "Why tell an idyl, when you can live one, little Chloe, little wild olive? You yourself shall be a heroine, my dear."
Idling there under distant trees for refuge from the August sun, which burns and browns our Grassy Fordshire, crumbling our roads to a gray powder and veiling with it the green of way-side hedge and vine—idling there, Dove was a creature I had never seen before and but half-divined in visions new to me. Fair as she seemed under our roof-tree, there in the woodland she was far the lovelier. Young things flowered about us, their fragrance scenting the summer air. Like them her presence wore a no less subtle spell. It was an ancient glamour, though I did not know it then, it seemed so new to me—one which young shepherds felt, wondering at it, in the world's morning; and since earth's daughters, then as now, with all their fairness, could scarce be credited with such wondrous witchery, those young swains came home breathless from the woodland with tales of dryads and their spells. Maiden mine, in the market-place, you are only one among many women, though you be beautiful as a dream, but under boughs the birds still sing those songs the first birds sang—there it is always Eden, and thou art the only woman there.
On my nineteenth birthday three climbed Sun Dial as three had climbed it once before. Leaving the village we crossed the brook by that self-same ford of stones, and plunged at once into the forest and ancient orchard that clothed the slope. I was not leading now, but helping them, Dove and Letitia, over the rocks and brambles and steeper places of the ascent. Threading as before that narrow trail I knew by heart, I broke the cob-webs and parted the fragrant tangle that beset our way, vines below, branches above us. It was just such another August noon, and the world was nodding; no birds sang, no squirrels chattered. We stopped for breath, resting upon a wall shaded by an ancient oak.
"The very spot!" I cried. "Do you remember, Letitia, how you and Robin rested here?"
"Yes," she answered.
"Do you remember how I called to you, and came running back?"