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The prospect, in its general outline, commands a close-built, high-piled city, stretching itself out beneath in a form, which, to a romantic imagination, may be supposed to represent that of a dragon; now, a noble arm of the sea, with its rocks, isles, distant shores, and boundary of mountains; and now, a fair and fertile champaign country, varied with hill, dale, and rock, and skirted by the picturesque ridge of the Pentland mountains.

She stopped, turned to face the west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged a thunderstorm she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be a deadly, terrifying peril she never had quite believed.

This for the men, I hasten to add; for then, as now, our American dames and maids would put a year's cropping of a plantation on their backs, thinking nothing of it; and there was no lack of shimmering silks and stiff brocades, of high-piled coiffures, paint, patches and powder at this merrymaking at Harndon Acres.

Some of them hauled to the front trains of soldiers singing and hallooing, high-piled bales of hay, bellowing cattle and ammunition in tightly-closed, sinister-looking cars. The others, in the opposite direction, came creeping homeward slowly, marked by the bleeding cross that the war has thrown upon all walls and the people behind them.

He gazed into her damp, mossy recesses where high-piled riven trees decayed under coats of living green, where dainty vines swayed and clambered, and here and there a yellow leaf, fluttering down, presaged the coming of winter. His love of the swamp laid hold of him and shook him with its force.

Above and about us the high-piled barriers of the mountains clambered steeply into space where the sky was blue and tuneful. I understood why Marcus had so resentfully repudiated the suggestion of turning his back on this country. I knew that a man whose eyes had first opened on such scenes would not wish that their last gaze should be exiled.

The house is no work of art, but an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of the field that it shall not be left disorderly, and waste or go to ruin through slovenliness or neglect; and, in return, grateful Ceres wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman.

A half-grown girl then appeared, and put the dishes on at the places indicated with nods and looks by Mrs. Putney, who had taken her place at the table. There was a platter of stewed fowl, and a plate of high-piled waffles, sweltering in successive courses of butter and sugar. In cut-glass dishes, one at each end of the table, there were canned cherries and pine-apple.

It was the season when all the Venice churches are draped in black, and services for the dead are held in them at dawn and twilight; and when I entered this Baroque interior, with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels blowing trumpets all so agitated, and yet all so dead and empty and frigid I would find the fantastic darkness filled with glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the discordant noise of chanting.

The chief tore the bread up into huge hunks, which he distributed to his dependents; and upon this supper the whole party went coolly to sleep more coolly, indeed, than agreeably for a keen north wind was whistling along the sedgy banks of the river, and the red blaze of high-piled fagots was streaming from the houses across the black, cold, turbid waters.