United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When I left Yorkshire, I was too young and too ignorant of the ever-changing film of daily existence to think or to care much about sequences; and the Hattons were a family of the soil; they appeared to be as much a part of it as the mountains and elms, the blue bells and the heather. I never expected to see them again and the absence of this expectation made me neither sorry nor glad.
And if they looked towards the window in the right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.
The kick-off, two or three plays, and then the timekeeper blew his piping note which brought to an end the struggle that was the true climax of all the games that had been played by the red and the purple since one school had stood on the hill above the town of Hamilton and another school had stood among the elms that sheltered the sons of Jefferson.
"Oh, look here. I say, there is the lady that was at the big house at Underwood, the lady that picked me up the day I ran away the one that was at the Elms. Look, mamma. Ah, you're just too late," cried Geoff, "you are always too late. She's gone now." It was Dick and not Lady Markland who came forward to the window.
The old house, set well back from the main road and near the river, with elms and maples and clumps of lilac bushes about it, was almost bare of the cheerful white paint that had once adorned it, and the green blinds were faded and broken; the barns never had been painted, and were huddled close to the house, hiding its fine Colonial lines, black, ungainly, and half fallen to pieces; all kinds of farm implements, rusty from age and neglect, were scattered about, and two dogs and several cats lay on the kitchen porch amidst the general litter of milk-pails, half-broken chairs, and rush mats.
The sun, in a word had not set behind the elms of Kensington Gardens, and was still gilding the statue erected by the ladies of England in honour of his Grace the Duke of Wellington, when Lady Clavering and her female friends left the gentlemen drinking wine.
In the valleys lay velvety meadows with their stately groups of elms, beneath which droves of cattle and sheep were grazing. Now and then lakes gleamed like sheets of molten beryl in their forest setting. Here and there we observed spaces in the valley resembling sunken gardens, with houses surrounded by their graceful elms, or having tree-bordered fields in their midst.
It is pleasant; but sunset comes so soon, and then after the trees are in shadow beneath, the yellow spots at the tops of the elms still receive the light from the west a few moments longer. There is something nutty in the short autumn day shorter than its duration as measured by hours, for the enjoyable day is between the clearing of the mist and the darkening of the shadows.
Then the aroma of wet dust, of drenched pavements, musty, acute the unforgettable exhalation of the city's streets after a shower pervaded all the air, and the little out-door activities resumed again under the dripping elms and upon the steaming sidewalks. The evenings were delicious.
The unearthly light that rests upon that time so far behind us shone strong for him he saw every twig in the rooks' nests in the lofty elms, every ivy leaf about a ruined oriel, black against a gold sky; the cool, dark smell of the box alleys filled his nostrils; the sound of the sea came to him; he heard his mother singing on the terrace.
Word Of The Day