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But England in her own way is unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such grassy lawns, such wooded tilth, are wholly unknown elsewhere. Compare the blank fields and long poplar-fringed high roads of central France with our Devon or our Warwickshire, and you get at once a just measure of the vast, the unspeakable difference. And man has done it all. Alone he did it.
There were affectionate farewells at the Paris station, where she got out with all her accumulation of bags and bundles. The train rushed on through the woods of Fontainebleau and across wide plains intersected by poplar-fringed canals. As the evening mists rose lights began to twinkle in cottage windows, and in the villages the church bells were ringing the prayer to the Virgin.
The vast height and width of the sky-arch, as seen from those flats as from an ocean the grey haze shrouding the horizon of our narrow land-view, and closing us in, till we seemed to be floating through infinite space, on a little platform of earth; the rich poplar-fringed farms, with their herds of dappled oxen the luxuriant crops of oats and beans the tender green of the tall-rape, a plant till then unknown to me the long, straight, silver dykes, with their gaudy carpets of strange floating water-plants, and their black banks, studded with the remains of buried forests the innumerable draining-mills, with their creaking sails and groaning wheels the endless rows of pollard willows, through which the breeze moaned and rung, as through the strings of some vast AEolian harp; the little island knolls in that vast sea of fen, each with its long village street, and delicately taper spire; all this seemed to me to contain an element of new and peculiar beauty.
The storm had passed, but the growl of the thunder and the far-off glint of a lightning-flash were to be heard and seen on the other side of the heavens. The moon shone out with its clear cold light, silvering the broad, hedgeless, poplar-fringed plains, and shining through the window of the carriage upon the crouching figure and her terrible companion.
"I suppose," he continued tentatively, "you couldn't tell me all about it?" "I couldn't," she answered. "It isn't my secret." Wrayson looked for a moment away from her, across the valley with its flower-spangled meadows, parted by that sinuous poplar-fringed line of silver, the lazy, slow-flowing river stealing through the quiet land to the sea.
Neither the grottoes and cascades of Tivoli, the cypress and ilex gardens of Frascati and Albano, nor the ruins of Tusculum, were ever so pleasant to her eyes as the poplar-fringed banks of the Indre, the corn-land sand hedgerows of Berry, and the rocky borders of the Creuse at Crozant and Argenton. She had not ceased making fresh picturesque discoveries in her own neighborhood.
Its summits were almost wholly devoid of shadow, and their notched and jagged outlines rested flatly against the sky, like ivory inlaid on a table of lapis-lazuli. From these waste hills, we descended into the valley of Cacia, whose poplar-fringed river had been so swollen by the rains that the correo from Malaga had only succeeded in passing it that morning.
The houses stood about a quarter of a mile from the stream, and between them was a straight, poplar-fringed road. Soon there could be no doubt about it. The procession was coming to a standstill. The big tug nosed her way in and lay up alongside the pier, where in that season of flood there was enough depth of water.
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