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24th April, 1868. We leave Chikosi's ruins and make for the ford of the Kalungosi. Marigolds are in full bloom all over the forest, and so are foxgloves. The river is here fully 100 yards broad with 300 yards of flood on its western bank; so deep we had to remain in the canoes till within 50 yards of the higher ground.
There were times when he loathed this labour of writing which came between him and the pleasure of living, so that he sometimes saw foxgloves and bluebells and primroses and violets and wild daffodils, not as the careless beauty of a Devonshire lane, but as picturesque material for a description in one of his chapters.
In the shade of the branches, on the borders of the paths, there are pink foxgloves, silences, ferns, almost the same flora as in Brittany; these two countries, the Basque and the Breton, resemble each other by the granite which is everywhere and by the habitual rain; by the immobility also, and by the continuity of the same religious dream.
A line of tattered flags, with no wind to stir them, led down from the truck of either mast, and as we drew near I called Mr. Jope's attention to an immense bunch of foxgloves and pink valerian on her bowsprit end. "Looks like a wedding, don't it?" said he; and turning up his clean white trousers he strolled down to the water's edge for a closer look. "Scandalous," he added, examining her timbers.
The roadside was gay with flowers, gillias and mountain balm; high pink and purple spikes, like foxgloves, which they were told were pentstemons; painters' brush, whose green tips seemed dipped in liquid vermilion, and masses of the splendid wild poppies.
They were in the midst of a plantation; on every side trees closed about them, with a low and irregular hedge to mark the borders of the grassy road. Nancy's eyes fell at once upon a cluster of magnificent foxgloves, growing upon a bank which rose to the foot of an old elm; beside the foxgloves lay a short-hewn trunk, bedded in the ground, thickly overgrown with mosses, lichens, and small fungi.
Through the poor man's ignorance, through his wondrous folly, I could discern an immense love that had overpowered him and broken him forever. He was an exile from his beloved land of Brittany, and would never see its heather and gorse again, or the flaming foxgloves that redden some of its fields.
One of them, over which she lingered, was of a charming, old-fashioned garden spattered with sunlight, and shut out from the world by a high brick wall. Behind the wall, again, were the dense masses of the trees, and at the end of a path between nodding foxgloves and Canterbury bells, in a curved recess, a stone seat. She turned her face. His was at her shoulder.
This is labour enough; stern indeed must be the mind that could work at summer's noon in Somerset, when the apple vineyards slumber; when the tall foxgloves stand in the heavy heat and the soft air warms the deepest day-shadow so that nothing is cool to the touch but the ferns. Is there anything so good as to do nothing?
Dark hollies clinging to detached rocks present varied and life-like forms. The air has suddenly become still. The butterflies hover over the foxgloves. The wild strawberry is at your feet. The sloeberries ripen around you. The sea before you might be the Mediterranean, so gently does it ripple up to the very edge of the hundred tiny plants that force their way amid the sand.
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