He dreaded to hear the words on Azariah’s lips:  you have come here with me to learn Hebrew and may not miss a lesson....  If he could persuade Azariah into the path he would not turn back until they reached the valley, and once in the valley, he might as well ascend the opposite hill as go back and climb up the hill whence they had come.  I am afraid, said Azariah, that this cool morning will pass into a very hot day:  the clouds that veil the sky are dispersing.  We shall not feel the heat once we are in the forest, Joseph replied, and the path up yonder hill is not so steep as the paths we go down by.  You see the road, Sir, twisting up the hillside, and it is planned so carefully to avoid a direct ascent that a man has just belaboured his ass into a trot.  They have passed behind a rock, but we shall see them presently.

Azariah waited a moment for the man and ass to reappear, but after all he was not much concerned with them, and began to descend unmindful of the lark which mounted the sky in circles singing his delirious song.  Joseph begged Azariah to hearken, but his preceptor was too much occupied with the difficulties of the descent, nor could he be persuaded to give much attention to a flight of doves flying hither and thither as if they had just discovered that they could fly, diving and wheeling and then going away in a great company, coming back and diving again, setting Joseph wondering why one bird should separate himself from the flock and alight again.  Again and again this happened, the flock returning to release him from his post.  Were the birds playing a sort of game?  Frolicking they were, for sure, and Joseph felt he would like to have wings and go away with them, and he wished Azariah would hasten, so pleasant it was in the valley.

A pleasant spacious valley it was, lying between two hills of about equal height:  the hill they had come down was a little steeper than the hill they were about to go up.  Joseph noticed the shadows that fell from the cliffs and those that the tall feathery trees, growing out of the scrub, cast over the sunny bottom of the valley, a water-course probably in the rainy season; and he enjoyed the little puffing winds that came and went, and the insects that came out of their hiding-places to enjoy the morning.  The dragonflies were bustling about their business:  what it was not easy to discover, but they went by in companies of small flies, with now and then a great one that rustled past on gauzy wings.  And the bees were coming and going from their hive in the rocks, incited by the fragrance of the flowers, and Joseph watched them crawling over the anemones and leaving them hastily to bury their blunt noses in the pistils of the white squills that abounded everywhere in the corners, in the inlets and bays and crevices of the rocks.  Butterflies, especially the white, pursued love untiringly in the air, fluttering and hovering, uniting and then separating—­aerial wooings