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There seemed such a total absence of all human intelligence about the man that the officers compared him in turn to the cattle browsing in the valley pastures, to the savages of America, or the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope.
I can remember that I showed it to a cow that was browsing by the wayside, exclaiming as I did so: 'Look at that, my old beauty; you will not often see its like again. "When I had reached the house I immediately called out to Mother Lecacheur, shouting with all my might: "'Hullo, there! Mrs. Landlady, come here and look at this.
It has little or none of the lordly character of the American forest, for the axe has felled its oldest and its grandest trees; but in the close wood which survives, live all the wild and pleasing peculiarities of nature: its complete irregularity, its vistas, in whose perspective the quiet cattle are peacefully browsing; its refreshing glades, where the grey rocks arise from amid the nodding fern; the silvery shafts of the old birch trees; the knotted trunks of the hoary oak, the grotesque but graceful branches which never shed their honours under the tyrant pruning-hook; the soft green sward; the chequered light and shade; the wild luxuriant weeds; the lichen and the moss all, all are beautiful alike in the green freshness of spring, or in the sadness and sere of autumn.
Under the shelter of the foothills, cold as the day was, his cattle were feeding in the open, scratching away the thin layer of snow and browsing on the tender grass underneath. An arctic world in appearance, it had an abounding life which made it friendly and generous the harshness belonged to the surface.
His domain extended for several miles along the beach, and, with deer quietly browsing in his grand old woods, formed a pretty picture. The beach shore now became more thickly settled, while out in the water, a few rods from each little house, arose the duck-blind, with the gunner and his boat inside, anxiously watching for birds, while their decoys floated quietly on the surface of the water.
I started up and looked around me, the moon was still shining, and the face of the heaven was studded with stars; I found myself amidst a maze of bushes of various kinds, but principally hazel and holly, through which was a path or driftway with grass growing on either side, upon which the pony was already diligently browsing.
The water lies in the ruts and ditches. The silence in the pauses of the wind is intense. You can hear the soft sound of grass pulled by the lips of unnumbered browsing sheep behind the hedgerow, or the cry of farmyard fowls from the byre below, the puffing of the steam-plough on the sloping fallow, the far-off railway whistle across the wide valley.
But the Jersey cow appeared to see no good reason for being hustled out of her luscious browsing ground. No sooner had the two breathless girls got near her than she turned and bolted squarely for the opposite corner of the field. "Head her off," screamed Anne. "Run, Diana, run." Diana did run. Anne tried to, and the wicked Jersey went around the field as if she were possessed.
Brown villages, not unlike those of Midland England, low houses built of stone and tiled with stone, and square-towered churches, occur at rare intervals in cultivated hollows, where there are fields and fruit trees. Water is nowhere visible except in the wasteful river-beds. As we rise, we break into a wilder country, forested with oak, where oxen and goats are browsing.
Here and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave their hands to the express; but for the most part it is an interruption too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that she has been even conscious of its passage.
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