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Presently they turned off at right angles, upon a country road shaded by century-old maples a road that meandered leisurely along, now dipping into a valley created for agriculture, now climbing a hillside rich with fruit trees; and now and then, from hilltop, or through gap in the verdure, the gleam of quiet, rush-fringed lakes came to Ruth and touched her, touched her so that her heart was soft and her lashes wet.... The whole was so placid, so free from turmoil, from competition, from the tussling of business and the surging upward of down-weighted classes.
The country, low-lying along the margin of the river and rising very gently as it swept away northward, presented just the combination of rich grass land and bush that seemed to promise an abundance of game, and about a mile upstream from our outspan the river broadened out and was rush-fringed in such a fashion as to suggest almost a certainty of wild duck; therefore, while the "boys" outspanned and attended to the cattle, I took from the wagon the double-barrelled combination of rifle and smooth-bore that I had purchased for my father a year before in Port Elizabeth, and, accompanied by the two dogs, set out for a little walk upstream, partly for the enjoyment of the walk and partly in the hope of securing something a little more appetising than buck meat for supper.
At intervals the stream opens out and forms a clear rush-fringed pool, and the trees receding on either bank leave a lovely grassy glade, where the deer and nilghau come to drink. On the glassy bosom of the pool in the centre, fine duck, mallard, and teal, can frequently be found, and the rushes round the margin are to a certainty good for a couple of brace of snipe.
Ives, its clear, broad, rush-fringed river, its quaint brick houses, with their little wharf-gardens, where the trailing nasturtium mirrors itself in the slow flood, its embayed bridge, with the ancient chapel buttressed over the stream but I must hold my hand; I must not linger over the beauties of the City of Destruction, which I have every reason to believe was a very picturesque place, when our hearts were set on pilgrimage.
Amidst scenes that have little changed since the Iceni hid in the marshland-bordering woods, and crept out in their coracles on the rush-fringed meres, he is at home with Nature, and becomes her friend, her lover. She holds back no secret from him if he wills that he should learn it; she charms him with her many moods.
What a day it had been, with the spring air which set mind and feet astir, the ride along the rush-fringed banks of the winding Mincio and the unworldly hours in the old farmstead!
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