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She could feel his one hot, vicious kiss upon her lips even yet. The woods calmed and soothed her with their grays and greens, and the infrequent birches, tall and slim, with circles of white still about them. Great tree boles stood up like hosts of silent Indian warriors, ready to pounce down on one.
Well, I never went to the hyacinth wood by moonlight, since so many objections were raised, but I did go once at noonday, the very most unlikely hour of all the twenty-four, and yet As I sat there beneath a gnarled thorn, weary and warm with my climb, I looked into the heart of a bluebell forest growing under a circle of gleaming silver birches, and suddenly I heard fairy music at least it was not mortal and many sounds were mingled in it: the sighing of birches, the carol of a lark, the leap and laugh of a silvery runnel tumbling down the hillside, the soft whir of butterflies' wings, and a sweet little over or under tone, from the over or under world, that I took to be the opening of a million hyacinth buds in the sunshine.
The resting-place which I myself had selected was a stack of firewood over the stokehole shoot; and as I lay upon it I could see the hills gradually darkening the water with a mourning veil as calmly they advanced to meet the steamer; while in the meadows, a last lingering glow of the sunset's radiance was reddening the stems of the birches, and making the newly mended roof of a hut look as though it were cased in red fustian communicating to everything else in the vicinity a semblance of floating amid fire and effacing all outline, and causing the scene as a whole to dissolve into streaks of red and orange and blue, save where, on a hill above the hut, a black grove of firs stood thrown into tense, keen, and clear-cut relief.
Lift your foot and you are over the wall; push with one finger and the gate is open." No, he could not. Most of the time he was in a stupor, a trance. His thoughts were indistinct, as when on the point of falling asleep. He only knew one thing, that he must stay where he was. The news came to her lying and fading in emulation with the rootless birches.
The first week in May, the cherry-trees were in blossom, and the alders and shad bushes were white in the borders of the woods against the filmy green of the birches.
No need for her to see the spot, too well she knew the winter terrors of the great forest, the snow heaped to the firs' lower branches, alders almost buried beneath it, birches and aspens naked as skeletons and shuddering in the icy wind, a sunless sky above the massed and gloomy spires of green.
Its windows looked east and west; through the west one, looking out on the back yard, came a flood of mellow June sunlight; but the east one, whence you got a glimpse of the bloom white cherry-trees in the left orchard and nodding, slender birches down in the hollow by the brook, was greened over by a tangle of vines.
Just before we reached Agawam, as I was riding a little before my companions, I was startled greatly by the sight of an Indian. He was standing close to the bridle-path, his half-naked body partly hidden by a clump of white birches, through which he looked out on me with eyes like two live coals.
I remember especially, a solitary visit to the pine woods after a deep snow storm, and the lifelong impression of it remains. The evergreens were bowed heavily with the weight of the snow, and across the wood path birches and various trees bent as if in prayer, obstructing the way.
Of course, in the early days of his rusticating, he was enthusiastic about his Italian-looking brick cottage, with its covered platform or gallery running round the first floor and supported on slender pillars, Its value, he was sure, would double when he had created the garden of Eden round about it, planted with poplars, birches, vines, evergreens, magnolias and sweet peas.
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