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Updated: May 20, 2025
The afternoon sun blazed upon the low hills, mere heaps of rubble like old moraines, where sometimes a little red sandstone cropped out and gave the wearied eyes a change of color. Always the noble vault of sky, the flying cloud-shadows, the Laramie range with its torn outlines softened by distance, which looked so near, yet was so far. Constantly we said, "How like to Arabia or Palestine!"
The mountains round the head of the lake, as we drove along it at a foot's pace that the carriage might not shake her, stood out in the sun; the light wind drove the cloud-shadows across their blues and purples; the water was a sheet of light; the larches were all out, though other trees are late; and every breath was perfume.
This roaring avalanche swept out of Melbourne and left it desolate, Sunday-like, paralyzed, everything at a stand-still, the ships lying idle at anchor, all signs of life departed, all sounds stilled save the rasping of the cloud-shadows as they scraped across the vacant streets.
How just, how truly scientific, to shut her in a steaming wash-house! The workhouse was situated in a lovely spot, on the lowest slope of hills, hills covered afar with woods. Meads at hand, corn-fields farther away, then green slopes over which broad cloud-shadows glided slowly. The larks sang in spring, in summer the wheat was golden, in autumn the distant woods were brown and red and yellow.
There was never any change in that landscape, except such as came from the sky cloud-shadows shaking like swift wings across the swamp of buttercups and sunshine, mists lying in strange islands by the sewers, rain turning all things grey, and the wind as it were made visible in a queer flying look put on by the pastures when the storms came groaning inland from Rye Bay ... with a great wail of wind and slash of rain and a howl and shudder through all the house.
The carriage, leaving the walls of Rome behind, rolled through narrow lanes where the wild honeysuckle had begun to tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places where the fields lay near, while she strolled further and further over the flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had once had a use and gazed through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills where the cloud-shadows had the lightness of a blush.
And Lord Henry struck a light on a dainty silver case, and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. There was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. How pleasant it was in the garden!
"May the Lord bless him!" he added, laying his great brown hands on the shining black curls of the child. Sunday morning rose clear and bright on Harpswell Bay. The whole sea was a waveless, blue looking-glass, streaked with bands of white, and flecked with sailing cloud-shadows from the skies above.
Over the sea the clouds were hurrying towards the land as ever and anon they rent themselves into strips, and revealed fathomless abysses of blue wherein the autumn sun burned uneasily, and sent cloud-shadows gliding over the puckered waste of waters, until, the shore reached, the wind further harried the masses of vapour towards the sharp flanks of the mountains, and, after drawing them up and down the slopes, relegated them to clefts, and left them steaming there.
Beyond the green stretches of the park rose peak after peak of sunlit mountains. There were a few cloud-shadows floating here and there. In one place, gleaming like a thread of silver, he could see a waterfall tumbling down a barren hillside. Suddenly, through the summer silence, an octave of bells pealed joyously. Nina started "Why, it's Sunday!" she exclaimed. "I had quite forgotten.
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