Then we realised what we had found. That which we had taken for the front of the house was only its back, turned, Moorish fashion, to the public road. Its front, all balconies and arches and tall old windows, looked towards the southeast, and from the first terrace, with its supporting colonnade, the ground sloped away in ever-widening spaces of wild greenery intersected with thick avenues of ilex trees that twisted away and lost themselves in dells beyond our view. The house really stood high, and was placed just where an opening in the undulations beyond gave a wide view of the Campagna stretching away to Tivoli and the Sabine Hills; but a moment after stepping down from that first terrace the outside world vanished and we found ourselves in one of the dream-gardens of the Renaissance, where it seemed as if no foot had trod for the last hundred years. The ilexes, all untrimmed, had united in dense roofs over the grass-grown avenues; the syringa had everywhere so interwoven itself with the high box hedges that these were now three and four feet thick and all abloom in their impenetrable interstices with white stars of sweetest perfume, mingling with the white cups of morning glories, unearthly pure and scentless, like the love prayers of a little nun. In ecstatic silence we went on and on, catching glimpses, through the rare openings in the green walls on either hand, of broad enclosures all a riot of flowers and grasses in the afternoon sun. It must have been at least a hundred years since the sun had struck through the many-tiered roof over our heads to touch the brown soil, bedded down with the leaves and acorns of a hundred autumns, under our feet. The shade that never could be shadow seemed painted in—a viewless veil of clear grey-brown, broken to an oval of gold where an archway in the hedge let in the westering sun. I had gathered a handful of ilex acorns, those delicate gems of polished grey-green set each in its fretted cup of colder grey—when a turn in the avenue brought us to a standstill before a statue on a pedestal—a young god in very old, dappled marble, his arms stretched out, his head thrown back, as if calling despairingly after some vanished worshipper. The deep greenery rose in an arch above him, the green walls shrank back to make a niche; the clear, colourless light touched his face and limbs almost to life as we looked at him—and then his appeal was answered. From some unseen point close to us there burst forth such a torrent of heart-broken song as can only come from the throat of an Italian nightingale in the solitude of a lost Italian garden. The silver notes went soaring to heaven and fell back in a rain of music like audible tears. Then, from far away, a sister Philomel took up the strain, another and another broke in and linked it on, till all the air was a delirium of music, wild and sweet and thrilling—going up from the little brown throats, without money and without price.