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The weather-beaten walls and arches were overgrown with masses of ivy and the thick, green grass of the newly mown lawn spread beneath like a velvet carpet. We had reached the ruin so late that it was quite deserted, and we felt the spirit of the place all the more as we wandered about in the evening silence.

My sap to plants and trees I must not grant, The vine, the olive, and the fig tree want: The Corn and Hay do fall before the're mown, And buds from fruitfull trees as soon as blown; Then dearth prevails, that nature to suffice The Mother on her tender infant flyes; The husband knows no wife, nor father sons.

It is not a silvery reflection of the sun, but glows with all its golden splendour. Who fears the fallen dew? It only makes the mown grass smell more fragrant. Adieu!

The plough with its short and almost perpendicular handles, its flat and arrow-shaped share, barely scratches the ground; the coarse but sweet grasses are mown with a stubbed scythe; and the wains are heard creaking through the hills on revolving axles, with wheels hewn out of solid pieces of wood, and in every respect as primitive as those used by Priam and his Trojans.

We took rank again and swept steadily on through the hot still hours into the evening shadows, until the sinking sun set a Gloria to the psalm of another working day. Only a third of the field lay mown, for we were not skilled labourers to cut our acre a day; I saw it again that night under the moonlight and the starlight, wrapped in a shroud of summer's mist.

Whether it be mown with the scythe or the mowing-machine, it is of advantage to have the surface of the field as nearly as possible level; and it is therefore most probable that these deep furrows had their origin at a period when a different state of things prevailed, when the farmer strove to grow as much wheat as possible, and devoted every acre that he dared break up to the plough.

They were diminutive and numerous, could take shelter in a forest of pine cones and were admirably suited to be mown down at the cannon's mouth. The King of England was a person with a fine figure. He had one leg and one arm, and the plume of his dragoon's helmet was shorn off; but his slight, erect figure still looked noble on a stately white palfrey.

At first Pashka had walked with his mother in the rain, at one time across a mown field, then by forest paths, where the yellow leaves stuck to his boots; he had walked until it was daylight. Then he had stood for two hours in the dark passage, waiting for the door to open. It was not so cold and damp in the passage as in the yard, but with the high wind spurts of rain flew in even there.

The highways were not bordered by unsightly weeds but had been mown. These thrifty farmers were not afraid that they would spend their last days in the poorhouse if they chanced to leave a few shade trees standing; so, in many places along the highways, lovely maples and graceful elms make of them, instead of furnaces, a traveler's paradise.

Dick and the colonel walked toward the field where the corn had been waving high that morning, and where it was now mown by cannon and rifles to the last stalk. In the edge of the wood the boy paused and grasping the man suddenly by the arm pulled him back. "Look! Look!" he exclaimed in a sharp whisper. "The Confederate skirmishers! The woods are full of them!