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They passed then from the high road into a long succession of green pastures, through which a straight public path conducted them into one of those charming lanes never seen out of this bowery England, a lane deep sunk amidst high banks with overhanging oaks, and quivering ash, gnarled wych-elm, vivid holly and shaggy brambles, with wild convolvulus and creeping woodbine forcing sweet life through all.
So he went forward slowly towards the light there was no track here often catching his feet among brambles and low plants, till the gloom lifted somewhat and he felt a freer air, and saw that he was in a clearing in the wood.
"I walk among brambles and leave a piece of my clothing on every one of them," thought Caesar, "and she passes artlessly between all obstacles, with the ease of an ethereal thing. It's extraordinary!" It pleased Amparito to be thus observed. Her husband used to tell her: "You have, as it were, ten or twelve Amparitos inside of you; it often seems to me that you are a whole round of Amparitos."
The ancient grandmother was sunken in many infirmities, and the household tasks had all fallen to the lot of Valeria. Latterly a stroke of paralysis had given old man Clee an awful annotation on the chapter of age and poverty upon which he was entering, and his little farm was fast growing up in brambles. "But 't ain't no differ, gran Mad," Valeria often sought to reassure him.
Then followed four or five years during which his conquests seemed to stand still. And then little by little, the brambles and wild growth rallied. Perhaps who knows? the assaulted wilderness had found its Joan of Arc. At any rate, it stood up to him at length, and pressed in upon him and drove him back.
Cornish thought of this open field which Marguerite's father had offered, and perhaps he thought of the hundred and fifty thousand pounds that lay beneath so bright a surface. On returning to "The Brambles," they found Mr. Wade reading the Times in the glass-covered veranda of that eligible suburban mansion.
It was rather a relief to be rid of that cloud of witnesses; and I began to look about me for a way to the back of the house. "Perhaps there'll be somebody in the garden," I thought. I found a way across the moat, scrambled over a wall smothered in brambles, and got into the garden.
If the ABREKS are on this side they must be caught, said he. 'That's what I say. They'll get off, said Ergushov, rising. 'True, they must be caught! Ergushov and Nazarka rose and, crossing themselves, started off for the cordon not along the riverbank but breaking their way through the brambles to reach a path in the wood.
Each pretty little ball of down scurries off and disappears in the brushwood; but, when quiet is restored, at the first summoning note they all return under the mother's wing. Even so, recalled by memory, do my recollections of childhood return, those other fledglings which have lost so many of their feathers on the brambles of life.
The governor, enfeebled by age, was carried in an arm-chair; while Callieres, disabled by gout, was mounted on a horse, brought for the purpose in one of the bateaux. To Subercase fell the hard task of directing the march among the dense columns of the primeval forest, by hill and hollow, over rocks and fallen trees, through swamps, brooks, and gullies, among thickets, brambles, and vines.
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