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We note the many different "tones" of the picture, the faint soft mist of the distant atmosphere over the marshes, growing darker on the poplars and the hilly bank in the middle distance; the shadow of the bank in the river; the gleam of the sunlight on the calm water mid-stream; the ripples about the jar; the sharply defined figures of the women, dark on the side turned from the sun; and the quivering shadow of the kneeling woman in the ripple-broken water in front.
Through the bottom of the coulee ran a little stream whose banks were packed tight with alders, willows and poplars. Following the trail to where it crossed the stream, Cameron left it for the purpose of quenching his thirst, and proceeded up-stream some little way from the usual crossing.
The landscape is one of the most lovely in the East, and its effect is heightened by its contrast with the adjacent heights, on which not a solitary tree is to be seen. Along the water-courses are willows, poplars, and sycamores; and the peach, apricot, pear, plum, and other fruits impart to large sections the appearance of a forest.
"Never in my born days have I known anything like it," said the nearest poplar. "Did you hear how the squire talked of his proud and stately poplars? We, who have stood guard along the road to his manor-house, summer and winter, year after year, all equally straight and still ... quite ordinary poplars, he called us!
The brave intention of frequency, so great with him from the moment of his finding himself unjustly suspected at Woollett, had remained rather theoretic, and one of the things he could muse about under his poplars was the source of the special shyness that had still made him careful.
The peasant, after a pause, during which his subtle intellect seemed to be occupied in profound disquisitions, expressed himself as follows: "Uncle Paso Largo, whom, for his great foresight, we call the Philosopher, set his plough in the Poplars, above the hermitage, and bit by bit, he has gobbled up six fanegas." "What an incomparable school!" exclaimed the young man, smiling.
Great masses of white smoke rose over the sides of the road. The whole hill-side from Ligny to St. Amand was on fire behind the willows and aspens and poplars.
Marette shrugged her slim shoulders the slightest bit and nodded for him to look upon what she knew he had already seen, her room. "It is not uncomfortable," she said. "I have been here for a number of weeks, and nothing has happened to me. I am quite safe. Inspector Kedsty has not looked inside that door since the day your big red-headed friend saw me down in the poplars.
And I ask despairingly whether he is not right perhaps. All the poplars rustle softly. With one voice, the voice of Summer itself, they say: "No! No! He is not right!" A little beetle crosses the path before me. I step on it unintentionally, but it flies away in desperate haste. It too has answered in its own way: "No, really, your friend is not right."
We well knew the danger of attacking such animals, which defend themselves both with these antlers and with their fore feet; with the latter they can strike the most terrific blows, sufficient to kill any assailant. Still, hunger made us daring. Besides the wood through which we were making our way, poplars and several other trees grew in the open ground.
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