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The sparrows themselves do not seem more at home here than do these night-hawks. One evening, after a sultry July day, a wild wind-storm burst over the city. The sun was low, glaring through a narrow rift between the hill-crests and the clouds that spread green and heavy across the sky.
The October sun flooded the landscape and showed up the wealth of autumn colour: tree-crested crags, ravines with brawling brooks, stretches of heather-clad moor, banks of faded bracken, rugged rocks and stony hill-crests were spread on the one hand, while to the west lay a distant chain of lakes, embosomed in meadows green as emerald, and reflecting the pale autumn sky in their smooth expanse.
Leaving General Greene in command of Fort Washington, on the Hudson, not far from Kingsbridge and the Heights, Washington hastened northward toward White Plains, seizing upon every naturally strong position by the way, and establishing a chain of entrenchments on the hill-crests that commanded all the roads leading from the North River to the Sound.
From the Sung-i-Nawishta defile, both sides of which were held, the semicircular sweep of the hill-crests was crowned by an Afghan host in great strength and regular formation.
Past hedges he rode, where cricket drummers beat the long roll for the muster of winter days; past gates letting into fields, clamped and chained to their posts as if jealous of the plenty which they guarded; past farmsteads set in dark forests of orchard trees and tall windbreaks of tapering poplar, where never a light gleamed from a pane, where sons and daughters, worn husbandmen and weary wives, lay soothed in honest slumber; past barn-yards, where cattle sighed as they lay in the moonshine champing upon their cuds; down into swales, where the air was damp and cold, like a wet hand on the face; up to hill-crests, over which the perfumes of autumn were blowing the spices of goldenrod and ragweed, the elusive scent of hedge orange, the sweet of curing fodder in the shock; past peace and contentment, and the ripe reward of men's summer toil.
The province is encircled on one hand by the yellow Tiber; on the other, by the bluish foot-hills of the Apennines; and it is full of ancient little towns, nestled in the vales, or perched upon the airy hill-crests, with crenelated towers and terraces which command far-reaching and inspiring views.
As the light slowly faded out and left the snow-white hill-crests drab with the gray of twilight, the man's mind reverted to those things which had sent him on his journey. Many doubts had assailed him by the way, doubts which set him debating with himself, but which rarely made him turn from a purpose his mind was once set upon.
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