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"Ah," she would say, in a little burst of rapture, "how splendid is my father!" The pearl rejoices in the power of the oyster to shut it away from the world. The bodach for whom he herded was a dour, ill-conditioned fellow, full of curses and violent threats, but the boy was content in the life of the hillsides, and troubled very little about the bodach's dour looks.
There has been no great issue ever resolved in Mariposa before the legal tribunal, which has not added its corpses to the mortuary selections lying in queer assortment on the red clay hillsides. "Justice nods in California while the pistols are being drawn." Hardin, closeted with his lawyers, suspends their eager plotting, to furtively confer in private with the judge.
They appear to have spent most of their means in the emigration, for they were able during the first year to buy only forty acres of land, and for eighteen months they lived in extreme poverty in holes in the ground, and under sheds built against hillsides; and ground their corn for bread in hand-mills, often laboring at this task by turns all night, to provide meal for the next day.
Scott went on after we had landed to make many remarks, mingled with picturesque anecdotes, concerning the fabulous beings with which the Scotch were apt to people the wild streams and lochs that occur in the solemn and lonely scenes of their mountains; and to compare them with similar superstitions among the northern nations of Europe; but Scotland, he said, was above all other countries for this wild and vivid progeny of the fancy, from the nature of the scenery, the misty magnificence and vagueness of the climate, the wild and gloomy events of its history; the clannish divisions of its people; their local feelings, notions, and prejudices; the individuality of their dialect, in which all kinds of odd and peculiar notions were incorporated; by the secluded life of their mountaineers; the lonely habits of their pastoral people, much of whose time was passed on the solitary hillsides; their traditional songs, which clothed every rock and stream with old world stories, handed down from age to age, and generation to generation.
But the Alban lake, which is self-contained, lying as it does surrounded by fertile hills, began for no reason, except it may be the will of Heaven, to increase in volume and to encroach upon the hillsides near it, until it reached their very tops, rising quietly and without disturbance.
The labourers on the roadside carting stones to this country of chalk were all in uniform. No women invaded this territory except, where, here and there, by rare chance, a wrinkled dame drove a plough across a lonely field. No children played about the brooks or plucked the wild flowers on the hillsides.
Their camps may be seen, on a clear day, far up the hillsides on the jungle-covered uplands of the remote interior; their tracks are occasionally to be met with mixed with those of the bison and the rhinoceros, the deer and the wild swine, but the people themselves are but rarely encountered.
The tender, young banners of green were almost ready for the decking of the trees, and almost completed was the weaving of pink and blue and lavender carpets of wild flowers for the hillsides. And the spring that had arisen glorious in Pearl's heart when she had realized that she and Harry were prisoners of the avalanche was still resurgent.
The two went homewards arm-in-arm, dancing down the hillsides, and singing gaily as they went. But suddenly, when they were still some way from the town, Merle stopped and pointed. "There," she whispered "there's mother!" A solitary woman was walking slowly in the twilight over a wide field of stubble, looking around her.
I know of two or three such trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, be propagated from, as early ripeners or September trees, and their seed be advertised in the market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared as much about them. At present these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there.
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