They drew themselves laboriously up to the crest, and sank breathlessly upon the verge among the crumbled grave pits, where the Greeks buried their dead along the great Temple road. Not only their beloved human companions they interred here, but the horses who had been Olympian victors, their faithful dogs, and their pet birds. It was in rifling these graves, in search of jewels and treasure, that the greedy Carthagenians had reaped a hideous pestilence as a price of their impiety. Now the graves were but empty grass-grown troughs, and one might sit among them safely to watch the skyey glories flush across the sapphire 227sea, and redden the hill where the little shrunken Girgenti sent down the soft pealing of Cathedral chimes from her airy distance. Beside them Concordia’s columns deepened to tints of beaten gold in the last rays, and across the level plain far below—already dusk—the people streamed home from their long day’s labour. Flocks of silky, antlered goats strayed and cropped as they moved byre-wards, urged by brown goatherds who piped the old country tunes as they went. The same tunes Theocritus listened to in the dusk thousands of summers since, or that Empedocles, purple-clad, and golden-crowned, might have heard vaguely fluting through his dreams of life and destiny as he meditated beneath these temple shadows as night came down. Asses pattered and tinkled towards the farms, laden with crimson burdens of sweet-smelling lupin. Painted carts rattled by with oil or wine; and cries and laughter and song came faintly up to them as the evening grew grey. “How little it changes,” said Peripatetica wistfully. “We will pass and vanish as all these did on whose tombs we rest, and hundreds of years from now there will be the same colours and the same songs to widen the new eyes with delight.” “Let us be grateful for the joys of Theocritus, and for our joys and for the same joy in the same old beauties of those to come,” said Jane, sententiously. “And let us go home, for the moon is rising.” Large and golden it came out of the rosy east, the west still smouldering with the dying fires of the ended day. Their way led through the olive orchards, grown 228argent in the faint light, and taking on fresh fantasies of gnarling, and of ghostly resemblances to twisted, convoluted human forms. Among the misty olives the blooming pear-trees showed like delicate silvery-veiled brides in the paling dark, and with the falling dew arose the poignant incense of ripening lemons, of blossoming weeds, and of earth freshly tilled.