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It had been by these firs he had halted twenty years ago, turning for one last glance at the valley below, the home valley which he had never seen since. But then the firs had been little more than vigorous young saplings; they were tall, gnarled trees now, with lichened trunks, and their lower boughs were dead. But high up their tops were green and caught the saffron light of the west.
About noon that day Ellen Jorth arrived at the Knoll, which was the location of her father's ranch. Three canyons met there to form a larger one. The knoll was a symmetrical hill situated at the mouth of the three canyons. It was covered with brush and cedars, with here and there lichened rocks showing above the bleached grass.
We walked, perhaps, half a mile, across timber-dotted turf, past a lake, entered a dark rhododendron-planted wood, ticking with the noise of pheasants' feet, and came out suddenly, where five rides met, at a small classic temple between lichened stucco statues which faced a circle of turf, several acres in extent.
Isoult knew she must beguile him now for his soul's ease and her own. When the ride grew broad and ran like a spit into a lake of soft dark she stopped. There was moss here, there were lichened heather-roots, rowan bushes, and a ring of slim birches, silver-shafted, feather- crowned and light; more than all there was a little pool of water which two rills fed. "We will stay here," said Isoult.
Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses, the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these staring vermilion words shone forth. They seemed to shout themselves out and make the atmosphere ring. Some people might have cried "Alas, poor Theology!" at the hideous defacement the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time.
The picture seemed to them also a combination of many things, or rather of attempts at many things Burne-Jones' mystical colour the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb: but they realised that it was a combination that only a remarkable talent could have achieved.
I raised my eyes, and before me, grim and lichened, stood the ancient whipping-post of the village; its sides fretted with the initials of a generation that scorned its mute lesson, but still clipped by the stout rusty shackles that had tethered the wrists of such of that generation's ancestors as had dared to mock at order and law.
The turf sloped away to a little stream that went singing cheerily over sparkling pebbles, bubbling and foaming round the base of grey lichened rocks, that reared their heads above the water, as if in angry remonstrance at their daring to interfere with its progress.
This playing at ghosts was the most innocent of the amusements indulged in by the choice young spirits who inhabited the lichened, red-brick building at the top of the town bearing 'W.D. and a broad arrow on its quoins. Far more serious escapades levities relating to love, wine, cards, betting were talked of, with no doubt more or less of exaggeration.
To the right of the house the land rolled away over another dun meadow that stopped at a rather civilized-looking hedge, above which rose a dense tumble of high trees. To the left lay the over-grown dooryard, the old lichened stone wall, and the sagging gate which opened to Winterbottom Road.
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