United States or Senegal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Day by day the flame of the Virginia creeper spread to the hillsides in wider waves of carmine and crimson, the larches glowed like the thin yellow halo about a fire, the maples blazed and smouldered, and the black hemlocks turned to indigo against the incandescence of the forest. The nights were cold, with a dry glitter of stars so high up that they seemed smaller and more vivid.
In the great swamps at the mouth of the Amazon the naturalist Bates describes a monstrous liana, the "Sipo Matador" or Murdering Creeper, that far more fitly than the oak tree of the north typifies John Bull and the place he has won in the sunlight by the once strong limbs of Ireland.
And then she went to swing in a hammock on the back veranda, and all her castles came tumbling about her ears, dealing her sharp, bitter blows. There was a thick creeper of passion-fruit vines behind her, and through it she could hear Tettawonga talking to the cook. "Marse Gillet on the burst agen," he said, and chuckled through the side of his lips where his pipe did not rest.
I had several times seen the little brown creeper clinging to the vertical wall of a tree and preening his plumes after a bath, and it was natural to suppose that his congener, the nuthatch, being also a bird of reptatory habits, would follow the same formula. But not so!
A little, a very little, is needed to make these premises healthful and comfortable. The removal of the manure-heap, stables, and cow-shed; a neat garden plot, a flowering creeper on the wall, and the aspect would be in accordance with the material condition of the owner. The property shared by this widow and her two sons consisted of between five and six acres, made up of arable land and meadow.
His first impression was that the house was smaller than he had thought very much smaller; his second was to perceive that all the vegetation between the house and the pine-wood had become extremely large. The roof over the well peeped amidst tussocks of grass a good eight feet high, and the canary creeper wrapped about the chimney stack and gesticulated with stiff tendrils towards the heavens.
"Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest." and fruit and flowers too lay sodden under foot. It was tough work getting through the few hundred yards of jungle of creeper thorns and boulders to the river's edge.
Something went snap, and I just flung a few things into a suit-case, dropped it out the window, climbed down the creeper and made a dash for freedom. Nothing on earth will ever take me back to that house again, nothing, nothing!" All this had been said with a mixture of humor and emotion that carried the boy before it. He saw and heard everything as she described it.
He looked about him at the room, walled in with books, with yellowed marble busts of great men on top of the book-cases. His feet sank in soft carpets. The smell of a pot of lilies mingled with the smell of leather bindings. The light in the room, filtered through the leaves of an overhanging creeper, was green and gold.
It was enough for me in the narrow world of my dogs' faces, and the red-leaved creeper at the window, the fir-trees on the distant heath, and her hand clasping mine.
Word Of The Day