THE TOWN.


 seems in the blaze of sunshine to be sunk in
 sleep. The flood of light laps and ripples
 against crumbling walls. A man with a lean
 dog at his heels passes with noiseless foot-
 steps, like a shape in a dream. A woman,
 leaning from the upper window of a house
 beside the sea-wall, laughs, and a spark of
 sunshine flashes from the gold cross swinging
 at her brown, warm throat, and then dims and
 fades in the overpowering brightness; her voice,
 which seems to have dropped through golden
 distances, melts into the flowering silence of
 the hot noon. The heavy sweetness of distant
 orange orchards has, without a breath of wind,
 invaded the old town; it makes the air, which
 is the very light itself, a subtle caress; and it
 brings a deeper dreaming, and a greater content
 with Life and Love and Death: they seem
 all one in this flood of ineffable shining.
 The point at which each experience touches
the current of Life and claims personality, is
strangely blurred and smoothed. The individual
sinks into the mighty stream, and his conscious-
ness is only the sunshine itself, and the air, and