Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
All the northern part of the property was thus acquired: more than five hundred acres of woods, intersected by clearings which roads soon connected together. And those clearings, transformed into pasture-land, watered by the neighboring springs, enabled Mathieu to treble his live-stock and attempt cattle-raising on a large scale.
His young wife's sunny, girlish outlook should not, with his consent, be clouded by a knowledge of the sordid things this material prosperity hid from view. A whited sepulchre seemed to him now the richly appointed house, the well-stocked gardens, the acres on acres of good pasture-land: a fair outside when, within, all was foul. He called to mind what he knew by hearsay of the owner.
As the moon rose a faint golden light began to tremble here and there on the waves, as if some subterranean caverns were lit up and sending to the surface faint and fitful rays of their splendor. Farther along the coast the tall banks of white sand grew white in the twilight, and the outlines of the dark pasture-land behind grew more distinct.
The house was near the centre of the town; yet from its back windows it overlooked a long green stretch of rough pasture-land, now a common, and once a fen, which came like a long green finger straight into the very heart of the town.
I loved, also, the songs of the Elizabethans, for they reminded me of the girl who had sung to me in the June night. In the afternoons I took my exercise in long tramps along the good dusty English roads. The country fell away from Biggleswick into a plain of wood and pasture-land, with low hills on the horizon. The Place was sown with villages, each with its green and pond and ancient church.
Between the terrace and the distant hills extended a tract of pasture-land, green and well-wooded by its rich hedgerows; not a roof was visible, though many farms and hamlets were at hand; and, in the heart of a rich and populous land, here was a region where the shepherd or the herdsman was the only evidence of human existence.
Why, nothing but the channels of the brown streams, some pasture-land and a few huts, then the unfrequented lake, and beyond that some ridges of white sand standing over the shingly beach of the sea. He would join them at dinner. Mackenzie protested in a mild way: he really wanted to see how the island was to be illustrated by the stranger.
We went down to the gardens and pasture-land, and stopped to rest at the Village of Geba, which hangs on the side of the mountain. A spring of whitish but delicious water gushed out of the soil, in the midst of a fig orchard. The women passed us, going back and forth with tall water-jars on their heads.
So there was a larger part of the place in hay and pasture-land than there had been at first, a larger proportion than there ought to be for really good farming on such land as his, he was willing to acknowledge. Haymaking was, therefore, the most important part of summer work at Ythan. There was much to be done, both in the house and in the fields.
In a dip in the ground a large red-brick house, with the rounded gables and high chimney-stacks of the time of James I., a forlorn, vast place, set in the midst of the pasture-land, with no trace of garden before it, and only a few large trees indicating the possibility of one to the back; no lawn either, but on the other side of the sandy dip, which suggested a filled-up moat, a huge oak, short, hollow, with wreathing, blasted, black branches, upon which only a handful of leaves shook in the rain.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking