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A SYLVAN PILGRIMAGE 213 breathed a wholly different sentiment. Here, too, as I looked at pine-grove or rock, or at small rudely- · terraced vineyard, bodiless presences showed them-selves to that organ of sight which sees them. But they were not nymphs or naiads ; they issued from a different stratum of history. Sometimes a knight in armour flitted like a shadow through the brush-wood ; sometimes in front of me plodded a mediaeval pilgrim ; once or twice I heard the voice of a trou-badour; and near the vineyards I saw Provençal peasants dancing. No doubt my imagination com-mitted many anachronisms and confused together many incongruous centuries ; but the wayward pa-geant for me had a perfect inward congruity; nor could the spectacles of any professor of history— —not even those through which Professor Preeman makes faces at Mr. Froude—have shown me any-thing fit, for pleasure's sake, to be compared with it. Nor were the real sights that saluted me less delightful than the visions with which they blended. The way continued to dip into rivulet-haunted dells, to climb bushy banks, and to skirt luxuriant slopes. Here and there through the world of greenness a liv-ing peasant came, with a sash like a red poppy, and sometimes a goat or two or a couple of desultory bullocks. The greenness was of all kinds and shades. Tall reeds grew by the shadowy rivulets; glossy caroub trees dotted stretches of sun-warmed soil ; cypresses and poplars towered in slender companies ;

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