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The outside walls of brick and stone are nearly four feet thick, and their external surface is covered by pink-tinted plaster which catches the thin light of the low-lying winter sun and causes the building to seem to glow. On the front of the building there are huge pillars rising from the second story balcony to the great Grecian gable facing the river.

Big motor cars rumbled up, loaded with troops who were hastily placed in position. The big guns of the Allied forces had opened up and were sending back shell for shell over the enemy lines. For over two hours the artillery kept up the Titanic duel. The fog was lifting, though still heavy in some of the low-lying sections.

A grassy old embankment to protect low-lying fields is Nature, and so is all the mass of apparatus about a water-mill; a new embankment to store an urban water supply, though it may be one mass of splendid weeds, is artificial, and ugly. A wooden windmill is Nature and beautiful, a sky-sign atrocious. Mountains have become Nature and beautiful within the last hundred years volcanoes even.

First the Moleross, and a range of mountains bathed in misty blue light, rugged peaks, scarred sides, white and tawny at once, rising into the clouds which hung large and soft in the blue; soon Mont Blanc, dim and aerial, in the south; the lovely valley of the River Sense; peasants walking with burdens on the white highway; the quiet and soft-tinted mountains beyond; towns perched on hills, with old castles and towers; the land rich with grass, grain, fruit, flowers; at Palezieux a magnificent view of the silver, purple, and blue mountains, with their chalky seams and gashed sides, near at hand; and at length, coming through a long tunnel, as if we had been shot out into the air above a country more surprising than any in dreams, the most wonderful sight burst upon us, the low-lying, deep-blue Lake Leman, and the gigantic mountains rising from its shores, and a sort of mist, translucent, suffused with sunlight, like the liquid of the golden wine the Steinberger poured into the vast basin.

If they are running on low-lying country and are driven off when a flood comes, they will probably walk back into the flood-water and get drowned as soon as their owner turns his back. But, as a rule, cattle are not suicidal. They sort themselves into mobs, they pick out the best bits of country, they find their way to the water, they breed habitually; but it always ends in the same way.

I remember that when for the first time, after a toilsome journey through the forest, the splendors of the Lower Au Sable Pond broke upon our vision, that low-lying silver lake, imprisoned by the precipices which it reflected in its bosom, he made no outward response to our burst of admiration: only a quiet gleam of the eye showed the pleasure our appreciation gave him.

Everywhere within the circle that my eyes covered which was not a very big one, for in the night the mist was thick and low-lying the old wrecks wedged together there were lighted with the same lambent flames: which came and went over their dead carcasses as though they all suddenly were lighted and then as suddenly were put out again; and farther away the glow of them in the mist was like a silvery shimmering haze.

No word was spoken for at least a quarter of an hour, during which time, although they rose buoyantly on the water, the waves washed continually over the low-lying deck. As this deck was flush with the gunwale, or rather, had no gunwale at all, the water ran off it as it does off a whale's back. Then there came a momentary lull. "Now, Moses 'bout ship!" shouted Van der Kemp. "Stand by, Nigel!"

In the industrial quarters, from top to bottom of the five-storied houses, the old private residences still standing in that low-lying district, where the warehouses have such lofty ceilings and majestic double doors, the nights are passed in the making up of gauze flowers and spangles, in the gumming of labels upon satin-lined boxes, in sorting, marking, packing, the thousand details of the toy, that great branch of commerce on which Paris places the seal of its elegance.

It followed, therefore, that if they were looking for the doctor and his family they were also looking for the boat and the fugitives it contained. The low-lying shore, with no trees fringing the bank, was the worst place for him and his friends, and he was in a fever of eagerness to reach the protecting shadows along shore.