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His pointed ears were set at a queer angle. There was nothing unusual to be seen, nothing Skag himself could hear. He paid closer attention; and presently, began to get a perfume. It was the great, good earth-smell; richer and fuller every minute. Then Nels stood up and faced the southeast. Skag looked where the dog seemed to be looking. Along the horizon line he saw an edge of dark grey.
Bradley abandoned himself to the spring, and his walk up the quiet street was a keen delight. The town seemed wofully small and shabby and lifeless; but it had trees and birds and earth-smell to compensate for other things. There was no one at the station to receive him, not even a 'bus. The station agent said: "Guess the Judge didn't know you was comin' or he'd been down here with a band-wagon."
But we deem it pardonable to record these mean incidents and poor delights, because they proved so greatly to Clifford's benefit. They had the earth-smell in them, and contributed to give him health and substance. Some of his occupations wrought less desirably upon him.
The air was wine; the moist earth-smell, wine; the lark's song, the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant and smoke of a distant train, all were wine, or song, was it? or odour, this unity they all blended into? I had no words then to describe it, that earth-effluence of which I was so conscious; nor, indeed, have I found words since.
It had been dark before now it was utterly dark! Suddenly the Gul Moti was aware of a strong earth-smell. There was no stench about. It had a quality of incense made of tree-gums and sandalwood and perfume-barks, all together. Then a dull thudding caught her ear almost rhythmic. . . . The earth-smells deepened and the thudding thickened.
In truth, his old soul was sick of them, and their very fragrance, which the warm sunshine made strongly perceptible, was odious to his nostrils. But the spicy, homelike scent of his other herbs, the English simples, was grateful to him, and so was the earth-smell, as he turned up the soil about their roots, and eagerly snuffed it in.
After tea they walked along the great Highway-of-all-India, by the edge of the native town and over the low stone bridge. Beyond the river, they passed acres of tenting. A glamour of dust lay in the slanting sun-rays. An intense earth-smell penetrated Skag's senses. A feel of excitement was in the air. "Where are the elephants?" Skag asked. "How do you know it's elephants?" the boy countered.
But the doings of the woodland folk could not yet be learnt by the little badgers, as by the experienced parents, from trifling details, such as the altered position of a leaf or twig, the ringing alarm-cry of a bird, the fresh earth-smell near an upturned stone, or the taint of a moving creature in the grass.
Every leaf and bud and blade seemed to contribute its exhalation to the pervading sweetness in which the pungency of pine-sap prevailed over the spice of thyme and the subtle perfume of fern, and all were merged in a moist earth-smell that was like the breath of some huge sun-warmed animal.
The mountains were lost in a ghostly world of fog, through which the river moved in stealthy silence, a dull thing of mystery, with only here and there a touch of silvery light upon its clouded surface. The cottonwoods and willows, on the opposite shore, were mere dreams of trees, gray, formless, and weird. The air was filled with the dank earth-smell.
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