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The wild mountain tract which stretched on either side of the road presented one bleak and brown surface, unrelieved by any trace of tillage or habitation; an apparently endless succession of fern-clad hills lay on every side; above, the gloomy sky of leaden, lowering aspect, frowned darkly; the sad and wailing cry of the pewet or the plover was the only sound that broke the stillness, and far as the eye could reach, a dreary waste extended.
Give us some fresh baked buns with country butter and honey, a dish of delicious berries picked by our own hands fresh from the bushes, a drink of sparkling ale from Nature's fountain among the cool fern-clad rocks, and we shall not lament the fact that we are so far removed from the public boarding house!
We jogged on slowly and silently for thirty miles in Indian file, through bursts of tropical beauty, over an ocean of fern-clad pahoehoe, the air hot and stagnant, the horses lazy and indifferent, till I was awoke from the kind of cautious doze into which one falls on a sure-footed horse, by a decided coolness in the atmosphere, and Kahele breaking into a lumbering gallop, which he kept up till we reached this house, where, in spite of the exercise, we are glad to get close to a large wood fire.
They have kept their promise to create a new Drumston in the wilderness, and are well content with their homes among the southern fern-clad hills. The history of their intercourse approaches the character of an epic.
In vain our eyes searched the sides of precipices formed of water-riven rocks fantastically piled one upon another; in vain we searched through endless dells and fern-clad crannies. There was nothing to be found. How could we expect to find two human beings hidden away in the recesses of this vast stretch of mountain ground, which no man yet had ever fully explored.
Deflecting from the path into a carriage driveway, he came through a woody hollow to the rear of The Brakes. The grounds were spacious, rolling toward the road beyond in a falling sweep of well-kept lawn. He skirted the green till he came to a "raveled walk" that zig-zagged up through the grass, leaving to the left the rough fern-clad bluff that gave the place its name.
Numerous babbling brooks intersect the forest, with moss-covered stones and fern-clad nooks.
A moment later they rounded an overhanging, fern-clad rock, and came full upon that at which Landless stared with a sharp intake of his breath, and which even his impassive guide greeted with a long-drawn "Ugh!" of amazement. Towards them brawled the impetuous stream through a wonderful gorge.
To be sure, the earliest butterflies and bees that arrived in the fern-clad period were starved for want of honey; but as soon as the valleys began to be thickly tangled with composites, harebells, and sweet-scented myrtle bushes, these nectar-eating insects established themselves successfully, and kept their breed true by occasional crosses with fresh arrivals blown to sea afterwards.
There was the stream rippling merrily; there the broken and fern-clad turf, with "its old hereditary trees;" but the ruins! the shattered arch, the mouldering tower, were left indeed but new arches, new turrets had arisen, and so dexterously blended with the whole that Godolphin might have fancied the hall of his forefathers restored not indeed in the same vast proportions and cumbrous grandeur as of old, but still alike in shape and outline, and such even in size as would have contented the proud heart of its last owner.
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