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If a horse gets in his hoofs make no impression on the firm turf of the Parramatta grass, and you get quite a hearty laugh by dropping a chair on him from the first-floor window. The game fowls of your other neighbour come fluttering into your garden, and scratch and chuckle and fluff themselves under your plumbago bush; but you don't worry. Why should you?

Then she took two steps downward from stone to stone. The blocks were half embedded in the turf and looked ready to fall under the smallest additional weight. "It is not I who say so, but your father who sent me," explained the admonisher from above. "Since it is all chance " she said, looking downward.

She was kneeling down in the chimney-corner, before two pieces of turf laid together with the heather inwards, blowing at the red-hot ashes with her breath till the turves flamed. The radiance lit her pale cheek, and made her dark eyes, that had once been handsome, seem handsome anew.

Once when it seemed near, the hooting of an owl near the open window drove it away; and once in the vague twilight before the dawn she started awake to hear the sharp thudding of a horse's hoofs galloping upon the turf not very far away.

The leaves are thinning and changing color; I watch them turning red on the pear-trees, gray on the plums, yellow on the walnut-trees, and tinging the thickly-strewn turf with shades of reddish-brown. We are nearing the end of the fine weather; the coloring is the coloring of late autumn; there is no need now to keep out of the sun.

I looked at their dwellings with great curiosity. Some of the buildings were conical and resembled the tent of the nomadic Lapps; but they were built of sod or turf. There were others resembling in shape log houses, with only a ground floor, built entirely of the same material. Others were partly of stone and turf. Some were entirely of stone slabs. Two houses were built of logs.

I reached Graden Wester before ten in the forenoon; for in those days I was an excellent pedestrian, and the distance, as I think I have said, was little over seven miles; fine walking all the way upon the springy turf.

And there was that profoundly strange feed box, imperturbable with its burden of fantastic mystery. Suddenly from down near her feet the girl heard a crunching sound, a sort of a nibbling, as if some silent and very discreet terrier was at work upon the turf. She faltered back; here was no doubt another grotesque detail of this most unnatural episode.

"Thus far," she said, "thus far AND NO FARTHER! No!" She became emphatically pink. "NO," she said again quite conclusively, and coughed shortly. "Thank you," she said to her ninth or tenth cake. Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on me. I was lying on the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about the primordial curse in Lady Osprey's mind.

The heat, increased by the oven-like tunnel grew steadily worse, and those in the rear gasped and fought for breath. They could hear the scuffle as the leaders fought the reptile, and the fetid odor of the dread creature added to their discomfort. Sicto had been swinging along ahead, stepping lightly on the mattress-like turf, when he felt something move under his foot.