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He was short, cadaverous, and withered, with his head sunk sideways between his shoulders and the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth as if he were on fire within. His throat, chin, and eyebrows were so frosted with white hairs and so gnarled with veins and puckered skin that he looked from his breast upward like some old root in a fall of snow.
Even the glow-worms had vanished, and the rough steps looked like natural niches in the rock. They were on the top of the mountain. Near by stood a grove of firs, the trees were so gnarled and stunted from their exposed position that they looked like a dwarf forest, and seemed appropriate growing there. "Your name is 'Norah'," said Karl boldly, "but that is all I know about you!"
He took his way to the sea, and tried to feel normal in a sailing-boat with a gnarled and corrugated old salt for his only companion.
The duke followed, but though they paused for some time beneath the gnarled oak-tree, the spirit did not appear. "And thus ends the adventure of Herne the Hunter!" laughed the duke, as they emerged from the brake. "By my halidom, Surrey, I am grievously disappointed. You must have mistaken some large stag, caught by its antlers in the branches of the oak-tree, for the demon."
"Ape!" growled a voice, and the jester was seized in a hairy hand and shaken till his bells jingled; and now Beltane beheld his captor, a dwarf-like, gnarled and crooked creature, yet huge of head and with the mighty arms and shoulders of a giant; a fierce, hairy monster, whose hideousness was set off by the richness of his vesture. "Ape, quotha!" he growled.
It is very refreshing to get here, the island has such a rich green look after California. It is quite rocky about us; but the rocks even are carpeted deep with moss, and the old gnarled branches of the oaks have a coating of thick, bright velvet.
I had a son, crooked spawn of a Christian! a son, not like you, cankered, gnarled stump of life that you are, but a youth tall and fair and noble in aspect, as became a child of one whose lineage makes Pharaoh modern, a youth whose foot in the dance was as swift and beautiful to look at as the golden sandals of the sun when he dances upon the sea in summer.
They stood so finely on the broken ground, each of them with a kingly space about him; there was so wild a fantasy in their gnarled and broken limbs; and under the night their scanty crowns of leaf, from which the sap was yearly ebbing, had so lofty a remoteness.
The house was on the site of the old ramparts, and the garden sloped to the fosse. A magnolia blossomed in it, and delicious pears, of the sort called "Bon chrêtiens," ripened on gnarled trees. This week was, in fact, a beautiful little prelude to school life, if Bessie had but known it. But her appreciation of its simple pleasures came later, when they were for ever past.
It proved a tedious undertaking to repair and make seaworthy the damaged boat. The trees on the island were, for the most part, small gnarled spruce, twisted and stunted by the northern blasts which swept the Bay. After some search, however, they discovered a white spruce tree suitable for their purpose, with a trunk ten inches in diameter. David felled it and cut from its butt a two-foot length.
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