"Dunsany, Lord - Fifty-one Tales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

upon a pipe. I asked him if the fairies had passed that way
or anything olden.
He said: "The poppy has grown apace and is killing gods
and fairies. Its fumes are suffocating the world, and its
roots drain it of its beautiful strength." And I asked him
why he sat on the hills I knew, playing an olden tune.
And he answered: "Because the tune is bad for the poppy,
which would otherwise grow more swiftly; and because if the
brotherhood of which I am one were to cease to pipe on the
hills men would stray over the world and be lost or come to
terrible ends. We think we have saved Agamemnon."
Then he fell to piping again that olden tune, while the
wind among the poppy's sleepy petals murmured "Remember
not. Remember not."













Roses




I know a roadside where the wild rose blooms with a strange
abundance. There is a beauty in the blossoms too of an
almost exotic kind, a taint of deeper pink that shocks the
Puritan flowers. Two hundred generations ago (generations,
I mean, of roses) this was a village street; there was a
floral decadence when they left their simple life and the
roses came from the wilderness to clamber round houses of
men.
Of all the memories of that little village, of all the
cottages that stood there, of all the men and women whose
homes they were, nothing remains but a more beautiful blush
on the faces of the roses.
I hope that when London is clean passed away and the
defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people
returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to
remind them of it all; because we have loved a little that
swart old city.