for them, and which seemed to swell the tremendous and exulting music of that magic day.
Around them, above them, below them—for the living and shining air of autumn, from the embrowned autumnal earth, from the great shapes of the hills behind them with their molten mass of colour—dull browns, rich bitter reds, dark bronze, and mellow yellow—from the raw crude clay of the piedmont earth and the great brown stubble of the cotton-fields—from a thousand impalpable and unutterable things, there came this glorious breath of triumph and delight. It was late October, there was a smell of smoke upon the air, an odour of burning leaves, the barking of a dog, a misty red, a pollenated gold in the rich, fading, sorrowful, and exultant light of the day, —and far off, a sound of great wheels pounding on a rail, the wailing whistle, and the tolling bell of a departing train.
And finally, the immortal visage of the earth itself, with the soaring and limitless undulations of its blue ranges, the great bulk of the autumn hills, immense and near, the rugged, homely, and familiar trees—the pines, oaks, chestnuts, maples, locusts—the homely look of the old red clay—the unforgettable and indescribable naturalness of that earth—with its rudeness, wildness, richness, rawness, ugliness, fathomless mystery and utter familiarity, and finally the lonely, haunting, and enchanted music that it made—the strange spirit of time and solitude that hovered above it eternally, and which can never be described, but which may be evoked by a cow-bell broken by the wind in distant valleys, the lonely whistle of a departing train, or simply a sinuous gust of wind that smokes its way across coarse mountain grasses when spring comes—all this, which Eugene had felt and known in his childhood, and yet had never had a tongue to utter, he seemed now to know and understand so well that he had himself become its tongue and utterance, the more its child because he had been so long away from it, the more its eye because he now saw it again as it must have seemed to the first men who ever saw it, with the eyes of discovery, love, and recognition.
And yet, for him all these things spoke instantly, intolerably, exultantly, not of home, return, and settlement, but of one image, which now burned for ever in his brain, rose like a triumphant music in his heart. And that image was the image of the enchanted city, in which, it now seemed, all the frenzy and unrest of his spirit would find a certain goal and triumph,
