United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Having buried himself in the wilderness, he builds himself a log hut, clears away a corn-field and potato patch, and, Providence smiling upon his labors, is soon surrounded by a snug farm and some half a score of flaxen-headed urchins, who, by their size, seem to have sprung all at once out of the earth like a crop of toadstools.
The yellow irises that stood about its marges held a pale radiance, and were like butterflies enchanted into immobility. Huge toadstools, vividly tawny as leopards, clumps of ladyfern not yet their full height and thick with curled fronds, stood proudly on their mossy lawns. But none of these was the Sign. 'If it dunna come soon I'll go home-along, she said.
Traitor to its kind, it has dropped from the ranks of the laurels, the heather, and the jolly little wintergreens to the colourless life of a parasite, hobnobbing with clammy toadstools and slimy lichens. Its common names are all appropriate, ice-plant, ghost-flower, corpse-plant.
Budgen, in whose grey eyes the fighting light so fortunately never died, painfully doing out her rooms, and propping herself against the chest of drawers whereon clustered china cups and dogs as thick as toadstools on a bank. "I've told my Charlie," she said, "to keep clear of Hughs a bit. They comes out as prickly as hedgehogs. Pick a quarrel as soon as look at you, they will."
To each was added new rooms, as the necessities of the inhabiting family demanded, and these additions hung like excrescences from all sides of the ugly huts, like toadstools to decaying logs. Every inch of ground was precious to the ever-increasing settlement.
"We wish our parasols were larger," sighed the toadstools; "but they are so small that, try as we may, we cannot get them to cast a large shadow, and now the breeze has died we have no messenger. If only one knew how to get word to the clouds!"
Then her father came in, and at once she asked after some sick person. "How goes it with him now," she said. "Well enough, says the leech; but he had well-nigh died in the night." "What is it that ails him? Can the leech tell that yet?" "He has taken somewhat that has poisoned him," the ealdorman answered. "The leech asked if he had eaten of mushrooms, or rather toadstools, by mistake."
A toadstool that vegetable which springs to full growth in a single night had torn loose and lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice its own bulk into the air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose. But what good would it do? All our afternoon's progress had been uphill.
Everywhere along the road they are to be met, perched on a rock, seated on a bank, squatted beneath a wall or hedge, and screaming, with outstretched hand, from the moment a carriage comes in sight until it is utterly passed by. As one approaches the town where the festa is held, they grow thicker and thicker. They crop up along the road like toadstools.
Here at last, after the dusty German valleys, we entered among real hills, round which and through which, by enormous tunnels, our train slowly went: rocks looking out of foliage; sweet little valleys, green as in early spring; the dark evergreens in contrast; snug cottages nestled in the hillsides, showing little else than enormous brown roofs that come nearly to the ground, giving the cottages the appearance of huge toadstools; fine harvests of grain; thrifty apple-trees, and cherry-trees purple with luscious fruit.
Word Of The Day