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He did not stop often to rest, and before noon he straightened and stood breathing deep but rhythmically to survey a levelled space where he had encountered an impenetrable thicket. Then Cal Maggard leaned his scythe and axe against a young hickory and went over to the corner of the yard where a spring poured with a crystal flow into a natural basin under the gnarled roots of a sycamore.
Pan might have looked in, ah! he is dead, his ghost then might have looked in upon them from behind some old gnarled tree, with a frown of envy at this intrusion upon his ancient domain. On the following morning, at the first faint glimmering of light, Micah was alert. He shook our young hero's shoulder and woke him from a pleasant dream.
Without pausing more than a moment to consider, he ascended the tree, and, a short distance from the ground secured the very position he wanted. Here the limbs crossed and recrossed, and gnarled themselves in such a way, that the most pleasant kind of bed imaginable was found, and he stretched out his weary limbs upon it, thanking Heaven that had guided him to such a favorable place.
Chrisfield felt his spine go cold; the German had shot himself. He ran off suddenly, breathlessly, to join the rest of the reconnoitering squad. The silent beeches whirled about him, waving gnarled boughs above his head. The German had shot himself. That was why he had no face. Chrisfield fell into line behind the other men. The corporal waited for him. "See anything?" he asked.
An old dead pine, whitened by many storms, its gnarled and twisted branches pathetic in their shorn splendor, is brought into prominence by the background of vivid green into which it seems to shrink, as if to hide its useless naked skeleton.
This is easily done, for if the reader can imagine a gnarled and venerable live oak-tree reduced to a little shrub two feet-high, with its rough bark, its foliage, its twisted boughs, all complete, he can picture the "sage-brush" exactly.
On the bank, right in front of where we lay, was a gnarled old tree, which seemed to be the home, or parliament house, of all the paroquets in the neighborhood. Scores of them kept up an incessant chatter the whole time. In the tree were two or three hanging nests, looking like large sacks suspended from the boughs.
The breeze blew faintly in through the great arched openings, behind which rose the mountain chain that led to his own Troödos; there were the groves of pine, darkly green, below the hills, with their deep solitudes for prayer and meditation between the vast gnarled trunks; and the group of the two noble women before him severely simple was a vision of love and womanly grace and spiritual need; the younger one, all pleading and pain, clinging to the elder who closely enfolded her, her face strong in the strength of love.
To the south so far as the eye could pierce the sea haze marshes. To the north where the river ran between bare dykes marshes. And withal a silence which was only intensified by the steady hum of the wind through the gnarled branches of the few churchyard trees which turn a crouching back toward the ocean.
Then, as they passed beneath some umbrageous oak, which stretched its ponderous and gnarled arms across the road, a night-hawk swooped from where it had been resting upon its parrot toes, its beak toward the bole of the tree, and skimmed round and round for a time to capture a great moth or two in its widespread, bristly-edged gape, before swiftly darting back to its perch, where it commenced its loud, continuous purring noise, which died softly away as the party rode on.
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