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In the morning we prepared for an early return to Mael, as the boatmen were anxious to get back to their barley-fields. I found but one expression in the guests' book that of satisfaction with Ole Torgensen, and cheerfully added our amen to the previous declarations. Ole's bill proved his honesty, no less than his worthy face. He brightened up on learning that we were Americans.

"Of course he's better, mother," she said more gently. It was Sunday, and the little valley was still with the stillness of warm, drowsy, quiescent life. At noon, the narrow road stretching between the shadowless barley-fields was haunted by slender, hurrying spirals of dust, like phantoms tempted by the silence to a wild frolic in the sunlight.

From the village of Göl, with its dark pretty church, we descended a steep of many hundred feet, into Hallingdal, whose broad stream flashed blue in the sunshine far below us. The mountains were now wooded to their very summits; and over the less abrupt slopes, ripe oats and barley-fields made yellow spots of harvest among the dark forests.

Lysander collected his wandering glance and fixed it upon one of the pale-green barley-fields. "It's about there, I reckon. Of course the old woman'll kick; but if the Colonel has laid out to do it he'll do it, kickin' or no kickin'. If he can't buy her out or trade her out, he'll freeze her out. Well, well, I ain't a-carin'; she can do as she pleases."

We got off at seven the next morning, struck the main road from Mogador, left it, and found ourselves in quite an agricultural country, green barley-fields, planted all over at intervals with figs and pomegranates, even hedges of a sort. Then again we were in the argan forest the last of it, and the best: beautiful trees, with their knarled, twisted branches. I thought of yews on the Surrey hills.

So they are there now, Joseph replied meditatively, for he was thinking he would like better to ride through marshes full of reeds than through a hilly country where there was nothing to see but the barley-fields beset by an occasional olive garth. But hooves were heard galloping in the rear and when the messenger overtook the caravan and blurted out Rachel's instructions, Joseph's face flushed.

Precipices of dark-red rock, streaked with foamy lines of water from the snows melting upon their crests, frowned over the narrow channels between the islands, and through their gaps and gorges we caught sight of the loftier ranges inland. Namsos, at the head of the fjord, is a red-roofed town of a few hundred inhabitants, with a pleasant background of barley-fields and birchen groves.

And Parker, as he climbed toward his lonesome cabin, understood. The afternoon train wound through the waving barley-fields of the Temecula Valley and shrieked its approach to the town of Muscatel. It was a mixed train, and half a dozen passengers alighted from the rear coach to stretch their legs while the freight was being unloaded.

Yes," exclaimed the Arab. "We have kept you too long in idleness. What have you done, or who are you, that we should maintain you? You must work for your living, as we do ourselves!" "We cannot do anything on land," said Jim. "We are sailors, and have only learnt to work on board a ship." "By Allah, you will soon learn! Come, follow us to the barley-fields!"

Eh! man, it's sweet to come home and see it all again; the folk standing at their doors, and bairns sitting on the dykes with flowers in their hands, and the waving barley-fields on the cliff tops shining against the sea and sky, as lights and shades change their places over a woman's hair.