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It did gladden the heart of one who viewed it that morning from the summit of the gently-curving Tamfield Hill Robert McIntyre stood with his elbows upon a gate-rail, his Tam-o'-Shanter hat over his eyes, and a short briar-root pipe in his mouth, looking slowly about him, with the absorbed air of one who breathes his fill of Nature.
It led straight away down a gently-curving aisle of beautiful large trees that had already begun to carpet the floor with dull pine needles, picked from their shaggy heads by the mischievous dryads of the valley. Away up on the shoulder of Cookstove could be seen a long silver ribbon of water, the lower end of which was lost in the treetops of the canyon.
Around the whole stood the taller forest trees; palmate-leaved Cecropiae slender Assai palms, thirty feet high, with their thin feathery heads crowning the gently-curving, smooth stems; small fan-leaved palms; and as a background to all these airy shapes, lay the voluminous masses of ordinary forest trees, with garlands, festoons, and streamers of leafy climbers hanging from their branches.
Amongst the latter the slim assai-palm was especially noticeable, growing in groups of four or five; its smooth, gently-curving stem, twenty to thirty feet high, terminating in a head of feathery foliage, inexpressibly light and elegant in outline. On the boughs of the taller and more ordinary-looking trees sat tufts of curiously- leaved parasites.
Then there were charming cool intervals, when the churches, the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the whole gently-curving line of the Riva, seemed to be washed with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm warm to the eye as well as to other senses. After the middle of May the whole place was in a glow.
This, disintegrating, had formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts, thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.
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