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This gentle aerial support is distributed throughout hundreds of fine meshes, and the sole contact with the earth is through twin living boles, pulsing with swift running sap, whose lichened bark and moonlit foliage excel any tapestry of man's devising. Perhaps it is atavistic this desire to rest and swing in a hamaca.
There are effects in tufts of spared woodland, and colours in wild vegetation, and in the upturned brown and umber of fields of ploughed earth, and in the grey lichened rocks and the clear tints of their broken edges. There are the associations and indications of human life, too; tokens of thrift and of poverty, of weary toil and of well-to-do activity.
Oh, but I cannot believe it was thirty years ago, for not a grass-blade or a pebble has been altered; and I perfectly remember the lapping of water under those lichened rocks, and that continuous file of ripples yonder, which are shaped like arrowheads." Adelaide rubbed her nose. "Did I promise eternal fidelity? I can hardly remember that far back.
On one slope, the roof was deeply weather-stained, and, nigh the turfy eaves-trough, all velvet-napped; no doubt the snail-monks founded mossy priories there. The other slope was newly shingled. On the north side, doorless and windowless, the clap-boards, innocent of paint, were yet green as the north side of lichened pines or copperless hulls of Japanese junks, becalmed.
A King Charles' spaniel, in another glass case, looked upon the company with an eternal snarl belied by the mildness of his brown eyes; and, corresponding to him on the other side of the fire, a numerous family of humming-birds, a little dusty and dim, poised perpetually above the flowers of a lichened tree, with a flaming sunset to show them up.
For a time, wrapped in the warmth and the green and gold mist, she lay as quiet as the sunbeam; of the earth earthy, in pact with the mould beneath the leaves, with the slowly crescent trunks, brown or silver-gray, with moss and lichened rock, and with all life that basked or crept or flew. At last, however, the mind aroused, and she opened her eyes, saw, and thought of what she saw.
One sees a few straight trunks of some kind of pine or larch, a network of branches and needles, a tumble of moss-spotted and lichened rocks, a confusion of floating lights and shadows, and that is all. The conviction of truth is instantaneous it is an actual bit of nature, just as the painter found it.
It touched him to the soul, and for a moment he wavered in his purpose. He stood beside her she seated on the old lichened seat and a silence fell between them, during which Mr. Wilding's conscience wrestled with his stronger passion.
Visions of it floated before me; snatches of music and gleams of light; figures moving in harmony; words, and looks; and my own white little person. All these made a kind of quaint mosaic with flashes of light on the river, and broad warm bands of sunshine on the hills, and the foliage of trees and bushes, and the grey lichened rocks at my foot.
He knew where the finest spruce-gum was to be found, in pale amber knots on the lichened bark, he knew where the nuts grew thickest in the beechwoods around the Harbour Head, and where the best trouting places up the brooks were. He could mimic the call of any wild bird or beast in Four Winds and he knew the haunt of every wild flower from spring to autumn.