United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Just at a point where a stretch of down-land ran into a little copse, was a small barrow. A round green mound, memento of a forgotten history that was real and visible enough in its own day, as real as the two children of "the Now," with whom the spot was a favourite camping ground.
There is the chalk of the Southern Down-land, the belt of the loam beneath it; then the curious country of sand, full of dells and dark with pine woods; then the luxurious meadows, which are open and full of cattle, colts, and even sheep; then the woods. It is, in a few miles, a little England.
Now Lugano was not fifteen miles as the crow flies from where I stood, and I determined to cut off that angle by climbing the high hills just above me. They were wooded only on their slopes; their crest and much of their sides were a down-land of parched grass, with rocks appearing here and there. At the first divergent lane I made off eastward from the road and began to climb.
There was no rain, but his hair and mustache were wet with a fog that was as thick as wool. By touch rather than by sight he presently became aware that he had left the heath, and was walking on down-land. Suppose he were nearing the verge of that line of cliff's which he had just seen, and should come to it before he was aware!
I knew it would be so; I felt my destiny, I felt it here in my brain. I felt it even when he scorned me in boyhood days. I believe that in those days he expected me to touch my cap to him. But those days are over, new days have begun. When to-morrow's sun rises it will shine on what is mine down-land, meadow-land, park-land, and wood-land.
I painted scenes in south-eastern England for my private view frequently now, scenes in cool greens and sober blues and restful grey scenes of weald and down-land, of hop-garden and country rectory. Over this last my fancy played and kindled ruddily in tiles and roses.
Nightjars, too, are down-land birds, staying in woods or fern by day, and swooping on the moths which flutter about the furze in the evening. Crows are too common, and work on late into the shadows.
At about this time it was that Tara noticed a kind of white sediment, quite inoffensive and not at all bad to eat, in her morning milk dish; and this she welcomed, because in some dim way it was connected in her mind with happy old days that came before her parting with the Master, when she had lived with him in a place not unlike this clean, fragrant down-land, which stretched now, far as one could see on either hand, outside the garden and the orchard, all about this new home, which Tara found so good.
She had paid the family of her predecessor a good price for them, but they were worth it. And just ahead, on her left, was a wide stretch of newly-ploughed land rising towards a bluff of grassy down-land on the horizon. The ploughed land itself had been down up to a few months before this date; thin pasture for a few sheep, through many generations.
It represents, or seems to represent, a piece of high open ground, down-land or heath, with a few low bushes growing there, sprawling and wind-brushed; a road crosses the fore-ground, and dips over to the plain beyond, a forest tract full of dark woodland, dappled by open spaces. There is a long faint distant line of hills on the horizon.
Word Of The Day