She would put her head on my shoulder; and when Leoni found me so, he called me his Virgin at the Manger. He would toss me his album and dictate his verses, which were almost always addressed to me. They were hymns of love and happiness which seemed sublime to me, and which must have been sublime. I would weep silently as I wrote them down; and when I had finished, "Well," Leoni would say, "do you think they are pretty bad?" At that I would raise my tear-stained face to his; he would laugh and kiss me with the keenest delight. Then he would sit down on the sweet-smelling hay and read me poems in other languages, which he translated with incredible rapidity and accuracy. Meanwhile I was spinning in the half-light of the stable. One must be familiar with the exquisite cleanliness of Swiss stables to understand our choosing ours for our salon. It was traversed by a swift mountain stream which washed it clean every moment, and which rejoiced our ears with its gentle plashing. Tame pigeons drank at our feet, and under the little arch through which the stream entered, saucy sparrows hopped in to bathe and steal a few wisps of hay. It was the coolest spot in warm days, when all the windows were open, and the warmest on cold days, when the smallest cracks were stuffed with straw and furze. Leoni, when tired of reading, would often fall asleep on the freshly-cut grass, and I would leave my work to gaze at that beautiful face, which the serenity of sleep made even nobler than before. During these busy days we talked little, although almost always together; we would exchange an occasional loving word or caress and encourage each other in our work. But when the evening came, Leoni became indolent in body and mentally active. Those were the hours when he was most lovable, and he reserved them for the outpouring of our affection. Fatigued, but not unpleasantly, by his day's work, he would lie on the moss at my feet, in a lonely spot near the house, on the slope of the mountain. From there we would behold the gorgeous sunset, the melancholy fading away of the daylight, the grave and solemn coming of the night. We knew the moment when all the stars would rise, and over which peak each of them would begin to shine. Leoni was thoroughly familiar with astronomy, but Joanne, too, knew that science of the shepherds after his manner, and he gave the stars other names, often more poetic and more expressive than ours. When Leoni had amused himself sufficiently with his rustic pedantry, he would send him away to play the _Ranz des Vaches_ on his reed-pipe at the foot of the mountain. The shrill notes sounded indescribably sweet in the distance. Leoni would fall into a reverie which resembled a trance; and then, when it was quite dark, when the silence of the valley was no longer broken by aught save the plaintive cry of some cliff-dwelling bird, when the fireflies lighted their lamps in the grass about us and a soft breeze sighed