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Updated: June 21, 2025


I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to make a snuff-box his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the time and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in two dips of his shovel.

Low conical hills rise from the banks of the river, each crowned by a pagoda, around which are many "kyoungs" and "zeyats." Scattered over the hill-sides are many others, gleaming white against the warm earth tints and the foliage which surround them. This is old Sagaing, once a capital of Burma; but the city has gone, and only its temples now remain.

They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hill-sides are the children of the water; and the smallest bright specks playing at hide and seek in the sky all night, must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.

For, lo! the tree-tops of human life are full of slumbering melodies, and if a song-sparrow pipe sincerely on the hill-sides of Judea, saying, after his own fashion of speech, "Behold, the divine dawn hath visited my eyes," be sure that the forests of far-off America, then unknown, will one day reply, and ten thousand thousand throats throbbing with high response will make it mutually known all round the world that this auroral beam is not for any single or private eye, but that the broad amber beauty of spiritual morning belongs to man's being, and that in man's heart, by virtue of its perennial nature, is prophesied the day whose sun shall be God and its earth heaven.

The eyes do gather them, far and near, on a whole day's journey. Not one is unperceived, even though great timber should be passed, and hill-sides dense and deep with trees. The fancy makes a poplar day of it. Immediately the country looks alive with signals; for the poplars everywhere reply to the glance. The woods may be all various, but the poplars are separate. It is easy to gather them.

When the command retired into the timber, the Indians followed and surrounded them, taking cover along the river banks below, and behind rocks and trees on the hill-sides above. The men dug rifle pits with their trowel bayonets and piled up rocks to protect themselves as best they could, and a sharpshooting fight was kept up from this position all day.

At one point the boat for a moment turned her bow to the shore to admit a young man, who brought with him a wonderful bouquet of wild flowers, which he had gathered at his home a few miles back; and here and there, where the hill-sides have a more moderate incline, you will see that some energetic pioneer has carved himself out a farm.

Two of the hinds followed their lord in a direction which led them out of the wood within sight of, though a considerable distance from, the white rock behind which Jackman and Quin were concealed. The others fled by tracks somewhat higher on the hill-sides, where however, as the reader knows, the enemy was posted to intercept them.

Dry and shadeless hill-sides, tilled with obtrusive tilth to their topmost summit; ploughed fields and hoary olive-groves silvering to the wind, in interminable terraces; long suburbs, unlovely in their gaunt, bare squalor, stretching like huge arms of some colossal cuttlefish over the spurs and shoulders of that desecrated mountain.

Ahead, at the crest of Murray Hill, the city seemed to end, and I to look through a great gate-way into the blue sky, and I fancied myself standing there in that gate-way, with the valley lying at my feet, my valley awakened from its winter's sleep, its hill-sides decked with blossoming orchards, its mountains carpeted with the soft shadows of the clouds.

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