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So he found his father alone in the terraced vineyard, digging about a plant. He was clothed in a filthy doublet, patched and unseemly, with clouted leggings of oxhide bound about his legs, against the scratches of the thorns, and long sleeves over his hands by reason of the brambles, and on his head he wore a goatskin cap, and so he nursed his sorrow.
Ichabod, whose fears increased with the delay, jerked the reins on the other side and kicked lustily with the contrary foot: it was all in vain; his steed started, it is true, but it was only to plunge to the opposite side of the road into a thicket of brambles and alder bushes.
Just above the station many rocks have pushed their heads out through the turf as though they, like the children, were interested in the railway. In a little hollow between three rocks lay a heap of dried brambles and heather. Peter halted, turned over the brushwood with a well-scarred boot, and said: "Here's the first coal from the St. Peter's Mine. We'll take it home in the chariot.
Then, after hurrying for a short distance in the direction he felt that his companions must have taken, he was brought up short in a clump of brambles, and, feeling the madness of attempting to follow farther, he began to think. "I must trust to Bunny getting him safely off, whether I will or not," he muttered. "Oh, but he's sure to get him aboard, and I had not reckoned on this.
His first impression was that the central ornament was a sundial; but when he had switched away some portion of the thick growth of brambles and bindweed that had formed over it, he saw that it was a less ordinary decoration.
Here and there granite boulders, bare and blasted, broke through the grey verdure of the dwarf oaks, and the sombre purple mountain with its bluish ravines formed an impassable barrier about the desolate landscape. The procession, preceded by Bob on his feathered steed, passed through a chasm overgrown with brambles.
Who thought you could make flowers grow? Our old nurse said it was only Demeter, the goddess, who could do that. Here, now, you have called up a bristling crop of thistles and brambles? On my word, Despard, it is a pity!" "Well, well, Goldilocks, see what you can make of them. I am doomed to work, though I don't wish it; and my work is always disagreeable, though I can't tell why!"
By and by pheasants as well as rabbits were strictly preserved, and the firewood-gatherers were excluded altogether. At present you find dead wood lying about all over the place, abundantly as in any primitive forest, where trees die of old age or disease, or are blown down or broken off by the winds and are left to rot on the ground, overgrown with ivy and brambles.
No dark stories; only a leading notion that he was a man who wanted to improve his fortunes, and would not be over-scrupulous as to the means. But as your over-scrupulous man is one in a thousand, this was ranking Captain Winstanley with the majority. The winter was over; there were primroses peeping out of the moss and brambles, and a shy little dog-violet shining like a blue eye here and there.
All the intervening ground was at first sight unavailable to one who wished to plant an ambuscade, because it not only had not any part that was woody, but none even covered with brambles, but in reality formed by nature to cover an ambush, so much the more, because no such deception could be apprehended in a naked valley and there were in its curvatures hollow rocks, such that some of them were capable of containing two hundred armed men.
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