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And as if below it, like the orchestral accompaniment of a dramatic solo, hummed many blending noises; faint calls of labourers in the palm-gardens and of women at the wells; chatter of children in dusky courts sheltered with reeds and pale-stemmed grasses; dim pipings of homeward-coming shepherds drowned, with their pattering charges, in the golden vapours of the west; soft twitterings of birds beyond brown walls in green seclusions; dull barking of guard dogs; mutter of camel drivers to their velvet-footed beasts.

Out from the city, a little less than two-thirds of the way down, issued a rather considerable stream. It seemed to come from under the wall fronting the plain. Its course, straight rather than sinuous, lay toward the south-west, and was marked by long lines of giant date-palms and pale-stemmed eucalyptus trees, till it lost itself in brown distances.

He came to a wide white place that was almost level, and beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the mirror surface of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-like beast sat on its tail in the midst of this space, started convulsively and went slinking into the undergrowth.

There was a hollow in the hillside where a few pale-stemmed birches and somber firs formed, as it were, a rampart between the poor, climbing meadows and the waste of gorse and fern, and we two beneath them seemed utterly alone in the moorland solitude. Grace sat on a lichened boulder with the sunlight upon her, gazing down across the levels of Lancashire.