myriad, uncounted drupes, hung from the superior privets ranged along the courtyard wall, dropping green shadows, like vast laces, over the blind-arched bricks below. A garden lay beyond the court, its gate hung thick and deep with yellow roses, clinging to the iron lantern, drooping and swaying in unconstrained festoons. Beyond the garden the place debouched into a forgotten graveyard. By night alive, by day the place was sunk in dreams, with lavish beauty everywhere composed to sleep in sunlit sloth, luxurious and deep. The place seemed fallen in a trance. The pigeons dozed along the eaves; and on the grass below, where the garden stretched, the peacock slowly danced his stiff and stately dance, an iris feather bubble, green as jade, purple as wine, blue as lazuli. The courtyard seemed the very home of sleep. The sun lay stupid on the silent walls and drowsily beat on the blue-doored cellars shut with cautious bars, closed fast and locked beneath the arcaded porch; the shadows of the slim pillars slept in the graceful galleries. All was hushed but the peacock’s cry, while that iridescent bubble, on toes black as ebony, danced, here and there, there and here, his slow “pavone” among the yellow roses. By night beneath the windows ancient tombs bared their sculptured breasts to the stars and stared up at the golden arches; and dank, black, cracked sarcophagi, chequered with light, laid broad their time-worn, sculptured emblems and tragical inscriptions,--skulls with wings, and urns, and hour-glasses whose un-refluent, palsied sands meet measure of eternity kept with motionless registry, and stony garlands of stone flowers which never bloomed, nor ever were sweet, as that beneath them had been sweet to man’s all quivering sense. Here lay the long dead, day and night, communicant in death; and wraiths of old unhappiness rose sighing with regret, or dreamed, beneath the stones, of love as futile as regret. The wind among the tombstones, like a stream from a windy fountain, murmured among the pomegranate-trees, stirred the shadows under the privets, rustled between the silken curtains, whispering, much as dead men do, chill, wordless, fluttering breaths of unsolved mystery. And when the wind from the graveyard whispered, all the place stood listening, hushed. The wind from the graveyard whispered among the saffron curtains; the ceaseless fountain waters fell; else all was still but the peacock’s wild night-cry, sounding through the unfathomable silence like the rending of an illusion,--deep and singular and strange,--by a harsh trumpet’s blast. Heh! The Devil keeps his promises in the way that suits him best. * * * * *