United States or Timor-Leste ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Anon a large fair city spread out at the foot of the serene mountains. Then you would come to an immense castle, so nigh the mountain that it seemed to grow out of it with its ivied walls and lofty towers pierced with quaintly paned windows. Crowds of sightseers passin' in and out its lofty arched entrance and walking through the grounds outside.

He had come quite into this view of the subject when he arrived at the Rectory, and saw the pretty old-fashioned house, with its high ivied garden-walls, and the famous cedar on the lawn, standing all secure and sweet in the early sunshine, like something too steadfast to be moved, as if sorrow or conflict could never enter there.

As I lingered round it, to-day, beneath the winter sunlight, the snow drifted pitilessly past its ivied windows, and so hushed my footsteps that I scarce knew which was the phantom, myself or my reflection, and wondered if the medical student would not argue me out of existence next. This is the end of my story. If I sought for a moral, it would be hard to attach one to a thing so slight.

Broad and low, with the gabled pediment of the porch showing through boughs of oaks, and a flight of bats wheeling over the ivied roof, the house appeared to Gay beyond a slight swell in the meadows.

And so it was that one still afternoon he found himself hidden under the dense greenish-black umbrella of a yew tree, lying prone on the ivied wall of the orchard of Ladykirk and listening to the talk of Patsy and Miss Aline, who were sitting beneath in a creeper-covered "tonelle," work-baskets by their sides, and as peaceful as if Ladykirk had been Eden on the eve of the coming of the serpent.

The old house, which had known so much, had sheltered so much, had kept counsel so long, seemed to resent the artificial peace that its present owner had somewhat laboriously constructed round himself, within its mellow, ivied walls.

The house stood on a plateau of ground high above Tweed, with a deep shawl of wood behind it and a fringe of plantations on either side; house and pleasure-grounds were enclosed by a high ivied wall on all sides you could see little of either until you were within the gates.

Opposite were the grassy slopes of Capitol Square with the pillared, white Capitol, in its midst, looking, in the moonlight, like a dream of old Greece. Her house! He looked upon its moonlit, ivied walls with adoration. A light still shone from one upper room. Was it her chamber? Was she, too, awake and alive to the beauty of this magic night? His heart beat tumultuously at the thought.

How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a tiny lost cry.

It had suddenly come to Nick's ears, however, that he cultivated a concurrent support in the person of a robust countrywoman, housed in an ivied corner of Warwickshire, in whom he had long been interested and whom, without any flourish of magnanimity, he had ended by making his wife.