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The air was of a crystal purity and delicious coolness, the sea, rough enough to attract the gaze, yet not so rough as to distract the nerves, and the sky's soft blue was occasionally flecked with small, faint cloudlets, that seemed like distant flocks of sheep, grazing in heavenly meadows. Only the battered ship beneath them recalled the fury of last night's stormburst.

Only the sea was occasionally flecked with racing sails that outstripped the old, slow-creeping trader, or was at times streaked and blurred with the trailing smoke of a steamer. There were a few strange footprints on those virgin sands, and a fresh track, that led from the beach over the rounded hills, dropped into the bosky recesses of a hidden valley beyond the coast range.

He snapped at the wrists of Dan like a beast, his lips flecked with a bloody froth. That bull-dog grip would not unlock. That animal, exultant laughter ran on in demoniac music. In his great agony the outlaw rolled his eyes in appeal to the crowd which surrounded the struggling two. Every man seemed about to spring forward, yet they could not move.

The last fording of the river had been made, and from the summit of the Red Buttes they looked down on the long level, specked with sage and flecked with alkaline incrustings, that lay between them and the Sweetwater. Across the horizon the Wind River mountains stretched a chain of majestic, snowy shapes.

It was well adapted to its purpose as a refuge from the heat of the summer day, for the walls were lined with cool, colored earthenware tiles, the floor was a brightly-tinted mosaic of patterns on a ground of gold glass, and in the circular central ornament of this artistic pavement stood the real source of freshness: a basin, two man's length across, of brown porphyry flecked with white, from which a fountain leaped, filling the surrounding air with misty spray.

I felt my pulse quicken. After all, it was a fair world, and the air, though keen, was a cordial. I let my gaze travel up that shining, glimmering track, and while I looked it was suddenly flecked with canoes. Long and brown, they swung down toward me like strong-winged birds upheld by the path of the sunrise. I looked back at the Indians.

His face was flecked over with peculiar brown spots which had a most hideous appearance, and his nose had been burst and shattered by some terrific blow.

The journey was along a road by neutral green hills, upon which hedgerows lay trailing like ropes on a quay. Gaps in these uplands revealed the blue sea, flecked with a few dashes of white and a solitary white sail, the whole brimming up to a keen horizon which lay like a line ruled from hillside to hillside.

The golden sunshine of the spring morning was deadened to a sombre tone in the shadowy courts of the Capuchin convent. The reddish brown of the walls was flecked with gold and orange spots of lichen; and here and there, in crevices, tufts of grass, or even a little bunch of gold-blooming flowers, looked hardily forth into the shadowy air.

Hardly in Wythburn was there any one so poor as to covet such shelter for a home. It was a single-storied house with its back to the road. Its porch was entered from five or six steps that led downwards from a little garden. It had three small rooms, with low ceilings and paved floors. In the summer the fuchsia flecked its front with white and red.