MADEIRA
we his sons supplicate and partake of his bounty; and now, alas! Candlemas comes and passes. And so it comes about that Spring has no joys for me as it has for others, and I hear the throstle’s liquid warble and the blackbird’s piping with a mute indifference, for throstle and blackbird, thanks to God, reproduce themselves each year, but this Madeira is the last of his race, splendidly sterile and icily null, and already we seem to detect in the blood of him the faint suspicion of tartness, which tells us that the end is nigh. The bloom of age is passing away; he is already gliding into his second childhood, the end of which is death. And we fear, we brothers who mourn him together, that he should be drunk regardless of seasons. But for all that he is not a companion to dally with
75
