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I have a recollection of Blenkiron, stark mad, encouraging his Americans with strange tongues. Once as I passed him I saw that he had his left arm tied up. His blackened face grinned at me. 'This bit of landscape's mighty unsafe for democracy, he croaked. 'For the love of Mike get your guns on to those devils across the river. They're plaguing my boys too bad.

That silvery streak was the River Foglia; that heap of buildings against the landscape's virgin white, the town of Pesaro. Madonna pointed to it with a sudden cry of gladness. "See Messer Biancomonte, how near we are. Courage, my friend; a little farther, and yonder we have rest and comfort for you." She had need, in truth, to cry me "Courage!" for I was weakening fast once more.

There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago. A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.

With pangs of hunger and thirst appeased, our pipes filled to the brim and the smoke therefrom curling and twisting itself into cloud-banks, we were a supremely happy lot, and with the poet was ready to sing: "The road is rough and the day is cold, And the landscape's sour and bare, And the milestones, once such charming friends, Half-hearted welcomes wear.

Here let me say to any who would try an amateur landscape art on their own acre at the edge of a growing town, that the town's growth tends steadily to diminish the amount of their landscape's natural water supply by catching on street pavements and scores and hundreds of roofs, lawns and walks, and carrying away in sewers, the rain and melting snows which for ages filtered slowly through the soil.

It was the time of budding things. In the valley of the Missouri the black elm boughs, the silvery sycamores and cottonwoods, and the vines on the gray rock-faced cliffs were veiled in shimmering draperies of green, with here and there a little group of orchard trees faintly pink against the landscape's dainty verdure.

A broken group in the landscape's immensity, they were like a new expression of its somber vitality, motionless yet full of life, in consonance with its bare and brutal verity. Courant left them to reconnoiter, and at mid afternoon came back to announce that farther on the trail bent to an outcropping of red rock where he thought there might be water. It was the hottest hour of the day.

Twisting and trembling along the track, it dwindles rapidly in the perspective, and is presently out of sight. It has left the city and the suburbs behind, and has sought the woods and meadows; but Nature never in the least accepts it, and rarely makes its path a part of her landscape's loveliness.

Had they been riding through some dismal swamp, the landscape's influence would have accounted for all these terrors. But it was the pretty region of Western Indiana, containing hills and bird-songs enough to swallow up a thousand stories of toll-gate robberies in happy sight and sound. Grandma Padgett, indeed, soon put her ban upon the subject of caves and night-attacks.

Up! where the airy citadel O'erlooks the surging landscape's swell! The word "pasture," as used on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, conveys no true idea to one whose associations with that word have been formed in States east of the Rocky Mountains.