United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It was a glorious morning with a high-arching pale blue sky and little baby-lamb cloudlets along the sky-line and the milk of life running warm and rich in the bosom of the sleeping earth. And I was bustling about in my apron of butcher's linen, after slicing oranges on my little maple-wood carving-slab until the house was aromatic with them, when the sound of a racing car-engine smote on my ear.

The weather was favorable when the first rough days were past, and after they rounded the curve of the wide sea hemisphere and began to near the American coast it became beautiful, with high-arching skies and very bright sunsets. Accustomed to the low-hung grays and struggling sunbeams of southern England, Imogen could not get used to these novelties.

There was a thin, eddying coil of bluish smoke hurrying from the galley chimney under the high-arching foot of the fore-course and out over the port cat-head; and the watch, having no sail-trimming to attend to, were squatted upon their hams on the fore deck, playing cards.

But on the way home to the Harris Ranch last night, with Dinky-Dunk silent and thoughtful, and a cold star or two in the high-arching heavens over us, I found that my little fire of enthusiasm had burnt itself out and those crazy lines of John Davidson kept returning to my mind: "After the end of all things, After the years are spent, After the loom is broken, After the robe is rent, Will there be hearts a-beating, Will friend converse with friend, Will men and women be lovers, After the end?"

Flowers and other graces are all confined to the high-walled precincts of Duke Cesarini, to which you must obtain admission twenty miles away. The houses on the other hand would generally lodge a New England cottage, porch and garden and high-arching elms included, in one of their cavernous basements.

I am not fond of chalk- white painted planks, certainly; I vastly prefer the dusky tones of ancient stucco and peperino; but I succumb on occasion to the charms of a vine-shaded porch, of tulips and dahlias glowing in the shade of high-arching elms, of heavy-scented lilacs bending over a white paling to brush your cheek.

She passed not out of sunlight into sunlight, but out of sunlight into a vast far-reaching, high-arching gloom, which was another world and another life; the solemn twilight which her upbringing had taught her to associate with God. Once before in her life, and once only, she had stood within the minster on her confirmation day, when she had entered with her hand in her mother's.