The crickets, chirruping amid the dew, Paused more than once to listen. Often, too, The bird of evening, the sweet nightingale, Kept silence; thrilling so at Vincen’s tale, As aye she harked her leafy perch upon, She might have kept awake until the dawn. “Oh, mother!” cried Mirèio, “surely never Was weaver-lad so marvellously clever! I love to sleep, dear, on a winter night; But now I cannot,--it is all too light. Ah, just one story more before we go, For I could pass a lifetime listening so!” CANTO II. _The Leaf-picking._ Sing, magnarello, merrily, As the green leaves you gather! In their third sleep the silk-worms lie, And lovely is the weather Like brown bees that in open glades From rosemary gather honey, The mulberry-trees swarm full of maids, Glad as the air is sunny! It chanced one morn--it was May’s loveliest-- Mirèio gathered leaves among the rest. It chanced, moreover, on that same May morning, The little gypsy, for her own adorning, Had cherries in her ears, for rings, suspended, Just as our Vincen’s footsteps thither tended. Like Latin seaside people everywhere, He wore a red cap on his raven hair, With a cock’s feather gayly set therein; And, prancing onward, with a stick made spin The flints from wayside stone-heaps, and set flying The lazy adders in his pathway lying. When suddenly, from the straight, leafy alley, “Whither so fast?” a voice comes musically. Mirèio’s. Vincen darts beneath the trees, Looks up, and soon the merry maiden sees. Perched on a mulberry-tree, she eyed the lad Like some gray-crested lark, and he was glad. “How then, Mirèio, comes the picking on? Little by little, all will soon be done! May I not help thee?”--“That were very meet,” She said, and laughed upon her airy seat. Sprang Vincen like a squirrel from the clover, Ran nimbly up the tree, and said, moreover-- “Now since old Master Ramoun hath but thee, Come down, I pray, and strip the lower tree! I’ll to the top!” As busily the maiden Wrought on, she murmured, “How the soul doth gladden To have good company! There’s little joy In lonely work!”--“Ay is there!” said the boy: “For when in our old hut we sit alone, Father and I, and only hear the Rhone Rush headlong o’er the shingle, ’tis most drear! Not in the pleasant season of the year, For then upon our travels we are bound, And trudge from farm to farm the country round. “But when the holly-berries have turned red, And winter comes, and nights are long,” he said, “And sitting by the dying fire we catch Whistle or mew of goblin at the latch; And I must wait till bed-time there with him, Speaking but seldom, and the room so dim,”--