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Our journey was not far. It led along the course of the Sacramento, and towards evening we came in sight of the diggings. A strange sight it was for one accustomed to London streets and shops. The Sacramento runs through a great inclined plane, sloping from the hill-country to the sea.
Around us is the Land of Gilead, a rolling hill-country, with long ridges and broad summits, a rounded land, a verdurous land, a land of rich pasturage. There are deep valleys that cut into it and divide it up. But the main bulk of it is lifted high in the air, and spread out nobly to the visitations of the wind.
Acting upon this belief two or three summers ago, when making, in company with my sister, a little excursion into the hill-country of New Hampshire, I turned my horse's head towards Barrington for the purpose of seeing these semi-civilized strollers in their own home, and returning, once for all, their numerous visits.
In the centre was a huge, gaily painted effigy of a hornbill, one of the birds sacred to all the tribes, and on it were hung thousands of cigarettes of home-grown tobacco wrapped in dried banana leaf. Three enormous pigs were now brought in and laid, bound as to their feet, before the chiefs, one for each of the main divisions of the people, the Barams, the Tinjars, and the hill-country folk.
But beneath this decorous surface the rankest, foulest, most desperate corruption throve. To the aged couple in the hill-country of Judaea, as to Mary and Joseph at Nazareth, must have come tidings of the murder of Aristobulus, of the cruel death of Mariamne and her sons, and of the aged Hyrcanus.
Even the hill-country of Galilee reaches an elevation of 4000 feet; and a flood which covered it could by no possibility have been other than universal in its superficial extent. Water really cannot be got to stand at, say, 4000 feet above the sea-level over Palestine, without covering the rest of the globe to the same height.
The other is seen in many a famous picture of the hill-country the Highland shepherd, wrapped in his plaid, with staff in hand and long-haired dog by his side, guarding his flock in silent glen, by still-running burn, or out upon the lonely brae. But in Thomas Douglas's day such types of Highland life were very recent factors in Scottish history.
The boys especially revelled in the flowers primroses and wild hyacinths and came home with huge bunches; they enjoyed the novelty of the woods and the wild hill-country, which is such a contrast to the flat and highly cultivated Vale.
In the hill-country silence, their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it; now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion, and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget.
So they came to their fire and sat down, and fell to breakfast; and ere they were done, the Maid said: "My Master, thou seest we be come nigh unto the hill-country, and to-day about sunset, belike, we shall come into the Land of the Bear-folk; and both it is, that there is peril if we fall into their hands, and that we may scarce escape them. Yet I deem that we may deal with the peril by wisdom."
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