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His toes only touched the ground, neither his heels nor the hollow of his foot; and from so light a pressure the grass, bowed but not crushed, rose up, leaving no more mark of his passage than if a grasshopper had gone by. Daintily fanning himself with his wings, the butterfly went before Bevis, not yet knowing that he was chased, but sauntering along just above the buttercups.
In another second he was swung through the sunlight, and laid out breathing hard in a death-bed of buttercups and daisies. There was not a moment to be lost, if I were to repay the debt of gratitude which in a flash I had seen that I owed him.
He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion, himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the notion.
Was all their fun to end in something terrible to sunny-hearted, merry Johnny Chuck, whom everybody loved? All of a sudden, pop! right out of the solid earth among the daisies and buttercups, just like a jack-in-the-box, came Johnny Chuck! He looked very warm and a little tired, but he was still chuckling as he scampered across to another hole of Grandfather Chuck's.
"The heather-bell costs nothing!" he thought, looking contemptuously at the masses of rare and beautiful flowers that surrounded him; "and the buttercups and daisies are as bright as the best of you!" He followed the artfully contrived ovals and squares of the Italian garden with a vagabond indifference to the symmetry of their construction and the ingenuity of their design.
A sweet, cool air blows up to you from the river, purple and white violets, buttercups and Quaker ladies are set thickly about your feet, the newly-arrived orioles are piping their pert little tunes nigh at hand, and you can spend a meditative hour or two sitting in the shifting specks of yellow sunshine filtered through the tender young leaves overhead, undisturbed by the shades of departed revelers that may be wandering behind the close shutters of the silent old house you have come so far to see.
"I will stop in the village," said Albert, as they drove away, "and leave you two to go home or take a ride, as suits you best; only mind, be home by tea-time, for I shall be hungry." There is no time when a drive along wooded country roads is more charming than when the trees are fast growing green, and the meadows spangled with daisies and buttercups.
"Oh, ever so far over the river, and over the hills, and past the woods; away away away down in a little hollow by the brook." The children looked at her with astonished eyes. She went on: "There are birds'-nests there, and little birds that sing. Oh, you should hear how they sing! And there are little lambs that play all day long among the clover. And there are dandelions and buttercups, and oh!
There are torrents to be crossed; rocky ravines with splashing waters where the sunshine pours down through a dense network of branches upon a carpet of russet leaves and grey boulders the envious beeches allowing of no vegetation at their feet; occasional meadows, too, bright with buttercups and orchids. No pines whatever grow in this forest.
And as I jotted down these words I noticed that some real stars had crept up into the sky, so gradually darkening above the pollard lime-trees; cuckoos, who had been calling on the thorn-trees all the afternoon, were silent; the swallows no longer flirted past, but a bat was already in career over the holly hedge; and round me the buttercups were closing.
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