United States or Saint Pierre and Miquelon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They cannot have been for pecuniary gain, because their labours have ever been gratuitous, and often expensive to themselves; pelted with hailstones, dripping with rain, torn by storms, blistered with sun-heat, in all parts of the land, over miles of barren hills and wild moor, through dirty lanes and new-ploughed fields, giving ungrudgingly of their strength; Sunday after Sunday leaving the home enjoyments of their family and the sanctuary to carry the Gospel of Christ to those afar off.
Part of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and grey: the rest is silvered with the level light, falling sideways on the burnished leaves and red fruit of the orange trees, and casting shadows from olive branches on the furrows of a new-ploughed field.
Nor waving yellow wheat, nor purple alfalfa bloom, nor ramparts of dark green corn on well-tilled land can hold for me one-half the beauty of the windswept springtime prairie. No sweet odor of new-ploughed ground can rival the fragrance of the wild grasses in their waving seas of verdure. We were coming home from Red Range late one April day, where we had gone to a last-day-of-school affair.
One night when he had been late on the road, loitering by fences, hearing the lonely barking of dogs at distant farmhouses, getting the smell of the new-ploughed ground into his nostrils, he came into town and sat down on a low iron fence that ran along by the platform of the railroad station, to wait for the midnight train north.
She chassed on tiptoe, and balanced with an indescribable hopping twirl, that made one think of a chickadee pursuing its quest of food on new-ploughed ground; and some late-awakened feminine instinct of dress, restrained, too, by due economy, indued her with the oddest decorations that woman ever devised. The French lessons went on more smoothly.
The new-ploughed land is surveyed with rapture by us; but it is something different from an English field, after all. The ground was so irregular and rough; our beasts were not too easy to manage; and then but this is unimportant it was our first essay at ploughing. The furrows are not exactly straight, and there is a queer, shaggy look about them.
How sweet and cool is the morning air, and how refreshing and bracing the light breeze is to the nerves that have been relaxed in warm repose! The new-ploughed earth, the snowy-headed clover, the wild flowers, the blooming trees, and the balsamic spruce, all exhale their fragrance to invite you forth. While the birds offer up their morning hymn, as if to proclaim that all things praise the Lord.
Higher and higher it rises, into the tree-tops, then over them; higher and higher, bathing the valley in soft, white light, uncovering the gray road that climbs the ridge-side; higher and higher, until the pines on the ridge-top stand out boldly, fringing into the sky; higher and higher, casting mysterious shadows over the meadows, touching with light the hillside, new-ploughed and naked; clear and white lies the road over the flats to the hill there clear and white and smooth.
There stood an empty bullock-cart on a little knoll half a mile away, with a young banyan tree behind a look-out, as it were, above some new-ploughed levels; and his eyelids, bathed in soft air, grew heavy as he neared it. The ground was good clean dust no new herbage that, living, is half-way to death already, but the hopeful dust that holds the seeds of all life.
He was a handsome figure of a man, and a man with a jovial heart and a sweet temper; but if they had come up then they never could have given you the mellowness of his voice, and indeed I consider photographs wanting in mellowness as a general rule and making you look like a new-ploughed field.
Word Of The Day