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The men are a hardy, sturdy race, wiry and lithe, inured to toil and cold, fonder far of the gun and sword than of the ploughshare, and steady riders of an equally wiry race of mountain ponies. Their dwellings are of stone and mud, often of two floors, flat-topped, with rugged, projecting eaves, the roofs being made of poles covered with the same material as the walls, stamped and smoothed.
Overhead the sky was blue and cloudless and upon the eaves of the farm-house the tiny sparrows chirped a greeting to little Prue who stood irresolutely upon the threshold, a wistful expression in her pretty brown eyes, as she twisted one of her short curls and looked over her shoulder to say good-bye to Tabby who lay in her accustomed place upon the large braided rug beside the kitchen stove.
Fly to and fro, O swallows, from your homes beneath the eaves of the blacksmith's old stone shop in the shade of the far-spreading walnut, stretch forth your importunate necks and lift aloft your greedy voices, O young ones in the nests! the little girl who has so often stood to watch you is sitting in the shadow within there, blind and deaf to you, and unaware of everything in the great world except the promotion of her father "in the war," and the letter he will be sure to get, because the blacksmith is going to send it along with his letter to his son.
Antoine rose in a rectangle around the sunny court, casting long shadows across the basin of the fountain. The strip of blue overhead was cloudless. Sparrows twittered under the eaves the yellow awnings fluttered, the flowers swayed in the summer breeze, and the jet of the fountain splashed among the water-plants.
There is a long cornery sort of closet full of carpets that runs back under the eaves in our attic, and if you strew handfuls of beads and tin washers among the carpets and then dig for them in the dark with a hockey-stick and a pocket flash-light, it's not poor fun. Unfortunately, my head knocks against the highest part of the roof now, yet I still do think it's fun.
It was his evening get-up. The proper time for the Sofala to arrive at Batu Beru was an hour before sunset, and he looked picturesque, and somehow quite correct too, walking at the water's edge on the background of grass slope crowned with a low long bungalow with an immensely steep roof of palm thatch, and clad to the eaves in flowering creepers.
By and by we get our positions in the shanty for the night, and arrange the row of sleepers. The shanty has become a smoke-house by this time: waves of smoke roll into it from the fire. It is only by lying down, and getting the head well under the eaves, that one can breathe. No one can find her "things"; nobody has a pillow.
My home was, and is a beautiful one, low and long, with all the rooms opening on the broad veranda; it is part of adobe and part of wood, the sides being covered with a network of fuchsia, heliotrope and jasmine reaching to the eaves of the brown tile roof; a broad, branching fig tree is in the little court before it, and a clump of yuccas and fan palms to the right, while down to the road and along the front stretches a broken hedge of Castilian roses, which we Californians love as the gift of old Spain, our first good nurse, we must always have a nurse it seems, England, Spain, Mexico and our present, very dry one but let us be content, our majority will come.
The bushes and trees were all untrimmed, and the old house with its shingled sides and coast-backed roof was covered with a trumpet-creeper and some grape vines. "What a lovely place for Hummingbirds!" cried Olive. "And Martins," added the Doctor, pointing to a bird-box with ten or twelve divisions in it, that was fastened under the eaves.
And all those years, a family of song-sparrows, and their descendants, had nested under the eaves directly above his window. Hatched out their young; fed them; and taught them to fly. Very well. This student fellow was all in a fever one morning because he believed that, at last, his great discovery was all but perfect. Just a few hours more and he would have it in the hollow of his hand.
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