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Our old-fashioned garden was hidden by a row of firs, while Bee set out beds of cannas and geraniums. To me it was simply hideous, but the look of complacency which Bee habitually wore as she thus brought us within the pale of civilization more than repaid me for any artistic losses we may have sustained.

Uncle Joe Tubbs and Mrs. Tubbs were driving up, in a country buggy. Father and Mother filled their nostrils with the smell of the salt marshes, their ears with the long murmur of the mile-distant surf, their eyes with the shine of the great dunes and the demure peace of a New England white cottage standing among firs and apple-trees scent and sound and sight of their freedom.

Mart took his forty-odd men back to the firs and scrub oaks at the lower point of the western hills, and there they stretched out in the brush, and prepared to bombard the ranch house. The moonlight was now Mart's friend instead of his enemy. The sheepmen were divided.

There was a rare breeze from the south blowing to meet us; the shadows of the spruces were long and clear-cut; the exquisite skies of early morning, blue and wind-winnowed, were over us; away to the west, beyond the brook field, was a long valley and a hill purple with firs and laced with still leafless beeches and maples.

Over a spacious lawn, and behind a black plantation of firs, the rising sun rent its way upward through piles of ragged gray cloud; heavy drops of rain fell few and far between; the March wind shuddered round the corners of the house, and the wet trees swayed wearily. Seven o'clock struck; and the signs of domestic life began to show themselves in more rapid succession.

The rugged south wall is feathered darkly along the top with an imposing array of spirey Silver Firs, while the rifted precipices all the way down to the water's edge are adorned with picturesque old junipers, their cinnamon-colored bark showing finely upon the neutral gray of the granite.

In the distance, blurred by the sheets of rain, was a line of low hills, with a jagged fringe of bluish firs and a solitary windmill. It must be a good mile and a half since we had passed a house, and there was none to be seen in the distance nothing but the undulation of sere grass, sopped brown beneath the huge blackish oak-trees, and whence arose, from all sides, a vague disconsolate bleating.

He felt it as the beginning of the disagreeables incident to a visit at aunt Pullet's, where he had once been compelled to sit with towels wrapped round his boots; a fact which may serve to correct the too-hasty conclusion that a visit to Garum Firs must have been a great treat to a young gentleman fond of animals, fond, that is, of throwing stones at them.

Did she, indeed, believe that the estates were lost to herself? Before the hour at which the coroner's inquest was to be held in the great dining-room, Reginald Eversleigh and Victor Carrington met at the appointed spot in the avenue of firs. One glance at his friend's face informed Victor that some fatal event had occurred since the previous day.

Outside, through the windows, over which had been hung curtains of red and yellow cotton, could be seen the green firs on the mountain, their branches dazzling under their burden of snow crystals; and stretching out seemingly interminably until the line of earth and sky met were the great hills white with snow except in the spots where the wind had swept it away.