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Passing suburban villas, close- shuttered, vine-trellised, handsome chateaux, each approached by stately avenues of plane or mulberry, cypress groves and vineyards, we are soon in the heart of the country. Little farmhouses are seen on either side, their ochre-coloured walls gleaming against the deep-blue sky fig-trees in every garden, with peach-orchards beyond, showing the brilliant fruit.
A miller was robbed the other night asleep by his sack: the door burst open, and he expected a bullet, but was let off with a clout on the head and the confiscation of his sack. Having ground the corn, sewage and all is conducted over the land, and enriches the fertile apricot- and peach-orchards, corn-fields and vineyards. The great orange-gardens lie beyond in the rich river-deposit.
The house was a barrack; now down in her Maryland peach-orchards the black muzzles of Federal cannon yawned, and under the flickering shadows and sunshine the grimy gunners, knee-deep in grass and dew, brushed away the startled clover-blooms, as they touched fire to the breach. Beltran was a Rebel. Vivia was a Rebel, too! She ran down-stairs into her little parlor overflowing with flowers.
Hast thou, then, so quickly forgotten our customs, among this folk who sell their wives and their daughters for silver? Come back with me to the North and be among men once more. Come back, when this matter is accomplished and I call for thee! The bloom of the peach-orchards is upon all the Valley, and here is only dust and a great stink.
"Yes," was the reply, "for in some places there are immense peach-orchards, covering many acres of ground; and when the trees in these are in blossom, the spring landscape seems to be pink with them. These great peach-fields are found in Delaware and Maryland, where the fruit grows in such perfection, and also in some of the Western States.
In one of these the stone statue of a man, in the Assyrian style, was discovered a few years ago. An ancient road leads from the peach-orchards of Damascus, along the banks of the Abana and over Anti-Lebanon, to the ruins of the temple of the Sun-god at Baalbek.
It was just another Tom Sawyer band, and they met in a secret place above Bear Creek Hill and planned how they would sell their lives on the field of glory, just as years before fierce raids had been arranged on peach-orchards and melon-patches. Secrecy was necessary, for the Union militia had a habit of coming over from Illinois and arresting suspicious armies on sight.
How was it that I could see his figure outlined more clearly against the horizon? Surely dawn was not coming on! No; I looked round on a world of naked peach-orchards, and corn-fields ragged with last year's stalks, all dimly lit by a moon that showed far from midnight; and that faint light on the horizon was not in the east, but in the west.
So the years drove on and the Golden Archer grew lonelier and lonelier. Came at last a spring when the scent of peach-blossom was like the hurt of too great joy, and far-away the peach-orchards splashed the land with pink. High up in the air the Archer looked wistfully southward and pointed his bow towards clouds of sweetness and rose-color.
In at the open door, whose frame is arabesqued with hanging sprays of sweetbrier, with the pendent nest, with fluttering moth-wings sunshine-dusted, with crowds of bursting buds, pours the mellow sun in one great stream, pours from the peach-orchards the fragrant breeze laden with bird-song.
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