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And he was more prodigal than most kings, for he had two crowns on his head. Also his hair grew in varying directions, like a wheatfields after a storm. He wore a coat without a tail, but with brass buttons to compensate, and a celluloid collar with a front attached. It was the Red Un's habit to dress first and wash after, as saving labour; instead of his neck he washed his collar.
On the west it is shut in by the plateau, and on the east the ridge breaks steeply down into the plain. Vineyards cover the hillsides with green and purple, and wheatfields wave in the valleys. In the distant east, across the Dead Sea, the mountains of Moab are penciled in dark blue against the sky. At the present time the town has eight thousand inhabitants.
On the spot where French patriotism afterward planted the bronze lion to commemorate forever the extinction of the Old Guard of the French Empire, and of Napoleon the Great, the traveler from strange lands pauses, at the distance of eighty years from the horrible cataclysm, and reflects with wonder how within the memory of living men human nature could have been raised by the passion of battle to such sublime heroism as that displayed in these wheatfields and orchards where the Old Guard of France sank into oblivion, but rose to immortal fame.
"I don't know, but one feels there's something beyond all that," he said. "It didn't come there by accident, and it has all its work to do. Sun and frost and sliding snow grinding up the hillside very sure and slow, and the river sweeping what it gets from them way down the valley to spread new wheatfields out into the sea."
The men were working so hard in the wheatfields that they did not notice the heat,—though I was kept busy carrying water for them,—and grandmother and Ántonia had so much to do in the kitchen that they could not have told whether one day was hotter than another. Each morning, while the dew was still on the grass, Ántonia went with me up to the garden to get early vegetables for dinner.
They were quite correct the birds were not in the hedges, they were in the corn and stubble. After the nesting is well over and the wheat is ripe the birds leave the hedges and go out into the wheatfields; at the same time the sparrows quit the house-tops and gardens and do the same. At the very time this complaint was raised, the stubbles in Surrey, as I can vouch, were crowded with small birds.
The broad stretch of fertile loam, where prosperous wooden towns are rising fast among the wheatfields, lay to the south of them, and the arid tract they journeyed through had so far no attraction for even the adventurous homestead pre-emptor.
For weeks before harvest Jarge patrolled my wheatfields, crowds of sparrows rising and dispersing for a time after every shot, only, I fear, to foregather again very soon on another field, perhaps half a mile distant. No doubt he sent some to my neighbours in return for those which they sent to me.
But he is said by judges to have less invention and less poetic sensibility than his contemporary and friend Ruysdael. Hobbema's subjects are usually villages surrounded by trees like those in Guelderland, water-mills, a slightly broken country, with groups of trees, wheatfields, meadows, and small pools, more rarely portions of towns, and still more seldom old castles and stately mansions.
For some reason, Claude began to think about the far-off times and countries it had shone upon. He never thought of the sun as coming from distant lands, or as having taken part in human life in other ages. To him, the sun rotated about the wheatfields. But the moon, somehow, came out of the historic past, and made him think of Egypt and the Pharaohs, Babylon and the hanging gardens.
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