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The birds were singing in the trees, which all about our hotel make what in the West would be called an "opening" in the wide and woodless expanse of hill and bog. This hotel was for many years the home of Lord George Hill, who built it in the hope of making Gweedore, what in England or Scotland it would long ago have become, a prosperous watering-place.
Elsewhere he remarks upon this form of house as follows: "On the great woodless plains of the Sacramento and San Joaquin, the savages naturally had recourse to earth for a material. The round, domed-shaped, earth-covered lodge is considered the characteristic one of California; and probably two-thirds of its immense aboriginal population lived in dwellings of this description.
The little girls troop, basket on head, from the outskirts of the village, where all day long they have been at work, kneading, drying, and stacking the fuel-cakes so necessary in that woodless country. The boys, half hidden in clouds of dust, drive the herds of gaunt cattle and ponderous buffaloes to the thorn-hedged yards.
And the vision he saw was of farm and farm-house and straw-thatched outbuildings, of children playing in the sun, and the good wife at the door, of lowing kine, and clucking fowls, and the stamp of horses in the stable, of his father's farm next to him, with, beyond, the woodless, rolling land and the hedged fields, neat and orderly, extending to the crest of the smooth, soft hills.
These vast plains were known to Herodotus, Strabo, and other ancient geographers only in their present Steppe, or flat and woodless condition. It is a great relief to the eye to see at last a handsomely-built city like Kursk, perched, relatively to the surrounding flatness, on an elevation and almost smothered in the verdure of numerous gardens.
Where we rode there were no habitations, not even a shepherd's hovel; the dry, stony soil was thinly covered with a forest of dwarf thorn-trees, and a scanty pasturage burnt to a rust-brown colour by the summer heats; and out of this arid region rose the hills, their brown, woodless sides looking strangely gaunt and desolate in the fierce noonday sun.
We reached the wooded island about one o'clock, made coffee, took on a store of wood, and set sail direct for the icy country, finding it very hard indeed to believe the woodless part of Charley's description of the Icy Bay, so heavily and uniformly are all the shores forested wherever we had been.
Late the following afternoon the Little Churchill swept through a low, woodless country, called the White Fox Barren. It was a narrow barren and across it lay the forest and the ridge mountains. Behind these mountains and the forest the sun was setting.
They were certainly bare of forest growth at a very remote period; for Herodotus describes the country of the Scythians between the Ister and the Tanais as woodless, with the exception of the small province of Xylaea between the Dnieper and the Gulf of Perekop.
The century of the pig-tail possessed no eye for the forest and, in consequence, no understanding of the natural life of the people. Everywhere in the German provinces they removed the princely pleasure-seats from the woody mountains to the woodless flat country. But then, to be sure, the art of the pig-tail age was almost entirely un-German.
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