As the soldiers turned
to look back, an invisible hand seemed to lift from the landscape the
last of these veils--a delicate vapor, like a diaphanous gauze through
which the glow of precious jewels excites our curiosity. Not a cloud
could be seen on the wide horizon to mark by its silvery whiteness
that the vast blue arch was the firmament; it seemed, on the contrary,
a dais of silk, held up by the summits of the mountains and placed in
the atmosphere, to protect that beautiful assemblage of fields and
meadows and groves and brooks.
The group of young officers paused to examine a scene so filled with
natural beauties. The eyes of some roved among the copses, which the
sterner tints of autumn were already enriching with their russet
tones, contrasting the more with the emerald-green of the meadows in
which they grew; others took note of a different contrast, made by the
ruddy fields, where the buckwheat had been cut and tied in sheaves
(like stands of arms around a bivouac), adjoining other fields of rich
ploughed land, from which the rye was already harvested. Here and
there were dark slate roofs above which puffs of white smoke were
rising. The glittering silver threads of the winding brooks caught the
eye, here and there, by one of those optic lures which render the soul
--one knows not how or why--perplexed and dreamy.
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