United States or Nauru ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Each day we expect to hear a cry of "Sail, ho!" and that our time of departure has come, but, of course, here things must be uncertain, so we must just patiently wait. On Saturday, in passing over Hill Piece, Graham and I saw smoke, and, getting on to Burnt Hill, saw large burnt patches and smoke and flames arising from various directions.
These little colored patches are stains upon the windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles. My hand trembles when I offer you this.
Not far distant lay some hilly ground, broken with deep gullies and thickly grown with wooded patches. Could they gain it, they would have a chance of concealing themselves. "Hullo! They've discovered we've gone!" exclaimed Jack suddenly, as behind them they could hear shots and bugle calls. "Don't spare the horses, boys; we've got to make that rough country."
Mick rather hurried over this stage of his "stravade," partly because he foresaw a blazing hot day, and he wished to be among more broken ground, where there are sheltered hollows scooped in the "knockawns," and cool patches under their bushes and boulders.
There is usually on each a section of meadow for the cattle, a section of tilled field for the wheat and corn and vegetables and a section of woodland for the fire-wood each strip, so divided, being a complete miniature seigniory. Everything is neat. The living owners, when they go to their graves, leave their little patches of earth as rich as they found them. There is no hurrying.
All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners.
"I'm going to," returned Patches. "But," he added with his droll humor, "I can't say how far." "Don't you know that he'll kill you if he can?" questioned the Dean curiously, while his eyes twinkled approval. "He does seem to have some such notion," admitted Patches. "You better let him alone," said the Dean. "You don't need to kill yourself to get a job with this outfit."
"I think that would be pretty," she answered, judicially, after a moment's thought. "What else can you do?" He appeared to be pondering his accomplishments. "Well, I can doctor trees," he said, pointing an efficient finger at the magnificent maple sheltering, like a guardian deity, the old farmhouse. "I put in those patches." "They're cement," she exclaimed.
Then something invisible happened, and presently a trolley piled high with logs detached itself from the group, and set out on a solitary journey down the railway, watched here and there by men in queer uniforms with patches on their backs.
The new road opened by the road party had so many patches of heavy sand on it, and long stages for water, that it was never used by carriers, and some years later Ramsay Bros. obtained permission from the Government to close that portion of it running down Jessamine Creek, on the Oondooroo run.
Word Of The Day