As I stand apart, here in the deep shadow of the convent wall, the thronging multitude sweeps by, growing thinner with every moment. The gleaming star of the monstrance sends back a last clear flash of sunlight as it turns the distant foot of the hill. Soon the straggling human fringe of the procession vanishes after it. A debris of blossom litters the long deserted way. Flags and streamers wave their bright hues over the dusty solitude. The street is forsaken, quiet again; save for the bells in the upper air, and the wind in the trees.
THIS morning, for the first time in the year, I found myself unconsciously taking the shady side of the way. It was a small thing, truly; but it stood as an index of something great, perhaps the most portentous thing that happens annually in the life of him who is a countryman at heart and not merely by name. Summer had come in. It was not only that the calendar told me the month was June. I felt it in the sunbeams, saw it in the hedgerows and trees, read it in the pure azure of the summer sky. I took the shady side of the lane unthinkingly, and laughed because I did it;—not that I laughed for that alone, but because gladness was welling up within me unbidden, irresistible: I laughed for the same reason that the nightingale sang in the green brier-thicket hard by.
I stopped to listen to the song. It was June, and the nightingales would not be singing much longer. Perhaps in a week’s time, at the worst, their music would be done. I silenced my footfall in the long grass by the wayside, and crept up close to the nightingale’s bower.
Every year a nightingale came to this brier-bush, and sang there as she was singing now. The hedge was a very old one, lifting its dense green barrier ten feet or more against the sunny southern sky; and, in all the years I could recall, the brier-bush had never been without its nightingale. This one must have her nest close by, where all her ancestors must have built their nests, for how many generations back, who can say? The life of this old hedge, towering far above me, and nearly as broad as it was high, could not be compassed by a man’s life. It was thick and tall when the oldest in the village was but a child. At long irregular intervals of years it had been trimmed, cut back; but the growth of the gnarled old stems, where they sprang from the ground, had not been checked. There its age stood recorded; and it would be little wide of the truth to think of it as already thick and tall, already the traditional singing-place of this race of nightingales, a full hundred years ago.