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The sunset certainly was a little dull last night, but we were quite unprepared for the dreary aspect of Dame Nature to which we awoke this morning. It was raining very heavily, and a dense pall of mist hung low among the pines, giving an impression of melancholy durability. There was obviously nothing to do but exist as cheerfully as might be until the weather improved.
It was slacker water above the rapid; and all afternoon they slid slowly up on deep, winding reaches of the still, green river. Sometimes it flashed under dazzling sunshine, but at least as often they moved through the dim shadow of towering pines that rolled, rank on rank, somber and stately, up the steep hillside, while high above them all rose tremendous ramparts of eternal snow.
He had never definitely shaped to himself the idea that there could anything happen to his mother; she was as much a part of his life as the aging apple trees and the hills that climbed, with low, gnarled pines to the sky's edge beyond the marshes, a point from which to take distance and direction.
Its bizarre beauty, so opposed to the sober gravity of the sedate pines and hemlocks, made it an unmistakable landmark. Here he dismounted and picketed his horse.
The two women followed him down the lawn to the point where his horse was hitched between the two big pines. Mrs. Mason patted the horse's great head and murmured to him to carry her son well. "Did you ever see a finer horse, mother?" said Dick proudly. "He's the very pick of the army."
A few miles from Oakland, on the side toward the mountain road and beyond the big woods, lay a district of virgin forest and old-field pines which, even before the war, had acquired a reputation of an unsavory nature, though its inhabitants were a harmless people.
It slanted a mile or so to the summit, wandered vaguely another two miles among gorse-bushes along the crest, passed Tom Bassett's cottage by the pines, and then dropped sharply down on the other side through rather thin woods to the ancient house where the old folk-lorist lived and dreamed himself into his impossible world of theory and fantasy.
He ate with an appetite that he had never known before, and he breathed by night as well as by day the crisp air of the mountains tingling with the balsam of the pines. It occurred to Dick that to be marooned in these mountains was perhaps the best of all things that could have happened to Albert.
The house stood in a park of some two hundred acres, in which the ground was poor, indeed, but beautifully diversified by rising knolls and little ravines, which seemed to make the space almost unlimited. And then the pines which waved in the Newton woods sighed and moaned with a melody which, in the ears of their owner, was equalled by that of no other fir trees in the world.
Strange and weird wood-notes in winter are nearly sure to be those of a raven or a jay; if deep, they are likely to come from a raven. "Quok, quok, ha, ha, ha-hreww, hrrr, hooop, hooop," the diabolic noises came, and Rolf, coming gently forward, caught a glimpse of sable pinions swooping through the lower pines.
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