A Novel. BY OUIDA, AUTHOR OF 'CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE,' 'HELD IN BONDAGE, (Published by Arrangement with the Proprietors of the English Copyright.) GEORGE ROBERTSON, MELBOURNE, SYDNEY, BRISBANE, AND ADELAIDE. 1876. Wilson Lesy Le-11-H SIGNA. CHAPTER I. He was only a little lad coming singing through the summer weather; singing as the birds do in the thickets, as the crickets do in the wheat at night, as the acacia bees do all the day long in the high tree tops in the sunshine. Only a little lad with brown eyes and bare feet, and a wistful heart driving his sheep and his goats, and carrying his sheaves of cane or millet, and working among the ripe grapes when the time came, like all the rest, here in the bright Signa country. Few people care much for our Signa and all it has seen and known. Few people even know anything of it at all, except just vaguely as a mere name. Assisi has her saint, and Perugia her painters, and Arezzo her poet, and Siena her virgin, and Settignano her sculptor, and Prato her great carmelite, and Vespignano her inspired shepherd, and Fiesole her angel-monk, and the village Vinci her mighty master; and poets write of them all for sake of the dead fame which they embalm. But Signa has found no poet, though her name lies in the pages of the old chroniclers like a jewel in an old king's tomb, written there ever since the Latin days when she was first named Signome-a standard of war set under the mountains. It is so old our Signa, no man could chronicle all it has seen in the centuries; but not one in ten thousand travellers thinks about it. Its people plait straw for the world, B |