United States or Singapore ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The trees of the all-surrounding forest sweet-gums, water-oaks, magnolias cast their shade obliquely along and across his way, and wherever it fell the undried dew still sparkled on the long grass. A pervading whisper seemed to say good-by to the great human world. Scarce the note of an insect joined with his footsteps in the coarse herbage to break the stillness. He made no haste.
Having passed a comfortable night, and making an early start without breakfast, I rowed rapidly over a smooth current to the stream called Bayou du Chien Creek, in which I made a very attractive camp among the giant sycamores, sweet-gums, and cotton-woods.
"Sugar trees" blazed in rustling torches of crimson and in the sweet-gums awoke colour flashes like those which glint in a goblet of burgundy. Before the house in the bend of the river the great walnut stood like a high-priest lording it over lesser clerics: a Druid giant of blond maturity, with outstretched arms that seemed to brush the drifting cloud-fleece by day and the stars by night.
The dark, rich reds of the oaks, the deep yellow of the beeches, the dogwood's and maple's gorgeous variations and the sweet-gums blood red mingled in a bewildering confusion of color.
Strange types of half- civilized whites, game enough to satisfy the most rapacious, beast and bird of peculiar species, and over all the immense forests of cypress, sweet-gums, Spanish-oaks, tulip-trees, sycamores, cotton-woods, white- oaks, &c., while the most delicate wild-flowers "waste their sweetness on the desert air."
There were the oaks the black-oak with its shining many-pointed leaves, the white-oak with its lighter green though duller-hued foliage, and the chestnut-oak with its long and thickly clustered leaves. Then there were the sweet-gums, fragrant and star-leaved, and the black-gum, tough, dark, and unpretending.
Word Of The Day