Excerpt from Tricotrin the Story of a Waif and StrayIT was autumn, a rich golden autumn of France, with the glow of burn ing sunsets, and the scarlet pomp Of reddened woods, and the purple and the yellow of grapes gathered for the wine-press, and the luscious dreamy odor Of overripened fruits crushed, by careless passing feet, upon the orchard mosses. Afar Off, in the full noon-day, the winding road was white and hot with dust, but here in a nook of forest-land, in a dell of leafy growth between the vineyards which encompassed it, the air was cool and the sunlight broken with shade, while, through its stillness where the boughs threw the shadow darkest, a little torrent leapt and splashed, making music as it went, and washing round the base of an old ivy-grown stone tower that had fallen to ruin in the midst of its green nest.There was no sound except one, beside that of the bright tumbling stream, though now and then there came in from the distance the ring of a convent clock's bells, or the laugh of a young girl at work among the vines - no sound except one, and that was the quick, sharp, gleeful crack Of nuts in a monkey's teeth. There were squirrels by the score there in that solitary place who had right, hereditary and indisputable they would have said, to all the nuts that the boughs bore and the grasses hid, but Mistigri was no recognizer of rights divine, she loved nuts and cared little how she got them, and she sat aloft in her glory, or swung herself from twig to twig, crushing and eating and ¿inging the shells away with all that gleeful self-satisfaction of which a little black monkey is to the full as capable, after successful piracy, as any conquering sovereign.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.