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Close-shaven lawns bordered it. They were artificial products, no doubt, but they were artificial successes undulating, earth-scented, fresh rolled every morning. Here there was an isolated shrub, there a thick bank of rhododendrons. And the buds, bursting into floral carnival, promised fine contrasts when their full splendour was come. The lake wavelets tinkled musically on a pebbly beach.

Words came at last, as after the welcome shower in summer's heat the song of birds rings through the woods, and out across the fields, upon the clear, earth-scented air words fresh from their long rest within his heart, unused in years of loneliness but unforgotten and familiar still untarnished jewels from the inmost depths; rich treasures from the storehouse of a deathless faith; diamonds of truth, rubies of passion, pearls of devotion studding the golden links of the chain of love.

He was neither a poet nor a moralist, though the latter title in France is often bestowed upon him a fact which strikingly helps to illustrate the Gallic lightness of soil in the moral region. Balzac was the hardest and deepest of prosateurs; the earth-scented facts of life, which the poet puts under his feet, he had put above his head.

Late in the afternoon the sky cleared and the red light of the lowering sun struck the crests of the higher hills to eastward. Brook went out and smelled the earth-scented air, and the damp odour of the orange-blossoms. But that did not please him either, so he turned back and went through the long corridor to the platform at the back of the hotel.

The breeze, roaming at will, shook drowsy perfume from the lingering flowers, but for all it aped the summer it was unmistakably an autumn breeze, melancholy, earth-scented. It stirred the curtains at Mary's window; rustled through the great bowlful of crimson leaves upon Esther's writing table and softly stirred the dark hair of the girl as she sat with her face hidden in her curved arms.

You find a vague memory of it at best in the useless grandeurs about you, and you seem to be looking at a structure of which the stubborn earth-scented foundations alone remain, with the carved and painted shell that bends above them, while the central substance has utterly crumbled away.