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The uniform and steady pull of the crew, directed in their time by the wild chaunt of the steersman, with whom they ever and anon join in fall chorus the measured plash of the oars into the calm surface of the water the joyous laugh and rude, but witty, jest of the more youthful and buoyant of the soldiery, from whom, at such moments, although in presence of their officers, the trammels of restraint are partially removed all these, added to the inspiriting sight of their gay scarlet uniforms, and the dancing of the sunbeams upon their polished arms, have a tendency to call up impressions of a wild interest, tempered only by the recollection that many of those who move gaily on, as if to a festival bright in hope as though the season of existence were to last for ever, may never more set eye upon the scenes they are fast quitting, with the joyousness produced by the natural thirst of the human heart for adventure, and a love of change.
After driving some six or seven miles, and always keeping within sound of the dull plash of the river, the landlord of the 'Jolly Tar' drew up suddenly by a dilapidated wooden paling, behind which there was a low- roofed habitation of some kind or other, which was visible only by reason of one faint glimmer of light, flickering athwart a scrap of dingy red curtain.
Alone he lived in the shadow of the great trees, happy when the piping of the birds was in his ears, and joying to listen to the plash and murmur of the brook that ran merrily beside his hut; or pausing 'twixt the strokes of his ponderous hammer to catch its never failing music. A mighty man was Beltane the Smith, despite his youth already great of stature and comely of feature.
The fire, under the low white marble, undraped and academic, had burnt down to the silver ashes of light wood, one of the windows, at a distance, stood open to the mildness and stillness, out of which, in the short pauses, came the faint sound, pleasant and homely, almost rustic, of a plash and a clatter of sabots from some coach-house on the other side of the court.
'Because you have a consciousness of success? in what do they call it? the attempt to raise her tone? You have been trying to wind her up, and you have raised her tone? 'Oh, Lady Davenant, I don't know and I don't understand! Laura broke out. 'I don't understand anything any more I have given up trying. 'That's what I recommended you to do last winter. Don't you remember that day at Plash?
Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.
So his heart yearned all the more for the gentler, more tender Iseult. Wearily he moved in his bed and watched for the first gleam of daylight. Slowly the hours dragged by, relieved only by the plash, plash of the waves against the castle walls, or the sighs of the sick man. Then within a while he spoke again.
They were superabundantly crude as yet happily for Olive, who promised herself, as we know, to train and polish them but they were as genuine as fruit and flowers, as the glow of the fire or the plash of water. For her scrutinising friend Verena had the disposition of the artist, the spirit to which all charming forms come easily and naturally.
It all rolled afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance !" The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but the plash of the water against stone.
All his life long will he remember those summer days, when her voice and the low plash of the far-off ocean waves wove themselves together into music as she read, and when the blue splendors of her lustrous eyes lent a new meaning to the poet's story as it flowed in melodious verses from her lips.
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