Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
Fig-trees surrounded the kitchens; a wood of sycamores stretched away to meet masses of verdure, where the pomegranate shone amid the white tufts of the cotton-plant; vines, grape-laden, grew up into the branches of the pines; a field of roses bloomed beneath the plane-trees; here and there lilies rocked upon the turf; the paths were strewn with black sand mingled with powdered coral, and in the centre the avenue of cypress formed, as it were, a double colonnade of green obelisks from one extremity to the other.
On the banks the children, in the intervals of school, are playing bull-fights, or some of their innumerable dancing and singing games; the women are one and all performing the gradual descent of the gamut with variations called singing; and above all is the glorious sun, transfiguring all things, and throwing deep, purple shadows from the high plane-trees along the banks.
Let us go back to May. One beautiful morning Robert was sitting working in his study, his windows open to the breezy blue sky and the budding plane-trees outside, when the door was thrown open and Mr. Wendover was announced. The Squire entered; but what a shrunken and aged Squire!
The Nile had overflowed its bed. The branches of the sycamores and plane-trees drooped and floated on the waves, but the boughs of the tall silver poplars strained upward, as if anxious to avoid the watery world beneath.
She saw the plane-trees just opposite her, and only a narrow interval of water divided her from the path which led straight up to the house. Her nervousness about venturing on the water with the child vanished in her present embarrassment. She hastened to the boat; she did not feel that her heart was beating; that her feet were tottering; that her senses were threatening to fail her.
The plane-trees were just at the height of their spotted beauty. Few very few-yellow leaves still hung; and the slender pretty trees seemed rejoicing in their freedom from summer foliage. All their delicate boughs and twigs were shaking and dancing in the wind; and their rain-washed leopard-like bodies had a lithe un-English gaiety. Noel passed down their line, and seated herself on a bench.
The Nile had overflowed its bed. The branches of the sycamores and plane-trees drooped and floated on the waves, but the boughs of the tall silver poplars strained upward, as if anxious to avoid the watery world beneath.
A curve in the tunnel made it appear much longer than it really was; till midway nothing could be seen ahead but deepening darkness; then of a sudden appeared the issue, and beyond, greatly to the surprise of any one who should have ventured hither for the first time, was a vision of magnificent plane-trees, golden in the August sunshine one of the abrupt contrasts which are so frequent in London, and which make its charm for those who wander from the beaten tracks; a transition from the clangorous cave of commerce to a sunny leafy quietude, amid old houses some with quaint tumbling roofs and byways little frequented.
At the end of a few miles of dusty road, swept by the powerful breath of the mistral, we suddenly reach a little village. It is a curious little community, with its central street adorned by a double row of plane-trees, its leaping fountains, and its almost Italian air.
He went on to his journey's end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle gleaming in the sun at the end; remembered the child Hélène, and how he and she had loved each other there, a hundred years ago; and thought of the exiled, worse than widowed woman immured there now: but it was mere remembering, mere thinking, it was mere cerebration.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking