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With that, mounting a little eminence, and shading his eyes with his hand, the marquess surveyed the plain below; and, at some distance, he beheld a horde of Moorish peasants driving some cattle into a thick copse. The word was hastily given, the troop dashed on, every voice was hushed, and the clatter of mail, and the sound of hoofs, alone broke the delicious silence of the noon-day landscape.
Liban was the daughter of Ecca, son of Mario, King of Munster. Ecca, having conquered the lordship of the half of Ulster, settled down with his people in the plain of the Gray Copse, which is now covered by the waters of Lough Necca, now Lough Neagh.
Wandering into a copse by the road-side but not in that place; two or three miles off he tore out from a fence a thick, hard, knotted stake; and, sitting down beneath a hayrick, spent some time in shaping it, in peeling off the bark, and fashioning its jagged head with his knife. The day passed on. Noon, afternoon, evening. Sunset.
They neither apologized or alluded to their delay. They had selected a spot on the other side of the copse, and the baskets could be sent around by the wagon; they had seen a slight haze on the plain towards the east which betokened the vicinity of the rest of the party, and they were about to propose that as the gentlemen were so near they had better postpone the picnic until they came up.
"Will you tell Dr. Maybright, my pretty little dear," she said, "that in these parts might is right, and that when the Queen wants Deadman's Copse, she can come and have a talk with me, and my two sons, and the dogs, Cinder and Flinder. But, there, what am I idling for with a chit like you? You and that other girl there have got to pay toll. You have both of you got to give me your clothes.
That pure opaque of the line of downs ran luminously edged against the pearly morning sky, with its dark landward face crepusculine yet clear in every combe, every dotting copse and furze-bush, every wavy fall, and the ripple, crease, and rill-like descent of the turf. Beauty of darkness was there, as well as beauty of light above.
A week ago one of your people cut down two oak saplings in my copse. You have dug up the road to Eresnevo, and now I have to go two miles round. Why do you injure me at every step? What harm have I done you? For God's sake, tell me! My wife and I do our utmost to live with you in peace and harmony; we help the peasants as we can. My wife is a kind, warm-hearted woman; she never refuses you help.
During a short halt, while the road was filled with infantry and artillery side by side, we felt the earth heave under our feet, followed instantly by a terrific report, and then a body of fire and flame, a hundred feet in diameter, shot skyward from beyond an intervening copse of woods.
During the long summer day, as his sheep cropped the good grass which the gods had made to grow for them, or lay with their forelegs doubled under their breasts and chewed the cud, Haita, reclining in the shadow of a tree, or sitting upon a rock, played so sweet music upon his reed pipe that sometimes from the corner of his eye he got accidental glimpses of the minor sylvan deities, leaning forward out of the copse to hear; but if he looked at them directly they vanished.
Out to the eastward, stretching away to an opposite range, lies a sandy desert dotted at wide intervals with little black bunches of "scrub mezquite" and blessed with only one redeeming patch of foliage, the copse of willows and cottonwood here at the mouth of a rock-ribbed defile where a little brook, rising heaven knows how or where among the heights to the west, comes frothing and tumbling down through the windings of the gorge only to bury itself in the burning sands beyond the shade.
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