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When all the women were hidden in the sallows, their goat-footed lovers, sitting on the grass of the new-come meadows, breathed in their flutes of reeds and drew from them sounds to destroy the peace of any creature of the earth.
One Sunday, toward the end of March, when we had a half-holiday, I walked up the hill that was crowned by a large monastery and sat down on the slope by a group of sallows. They were in full bloom. A swarm of bees and flies were buzzing round. Peacock and Tortoiseshell butterflies were flitting to and fro. The sunlight filtered down through the bluish haze. I rested and let an hour or two slip by.
The ice-white mountains clustered all around us, But arctic summer blossomed at our feet; The perfume of the creeping sallows found us, The cranberry-flowers were sweet. Below us through the valley crept a river, Cleft round an island where the Lap-men lay; Its sluggish water dragged with slow endeavour The mountain snows away.
Miles up the stream, dreary, dreary; poplars leaning aslant from the wind, low mud-banks, beds of osiers, reeds, rushes, willows; poplars standing erect as a regiment in line, as many regiments, a gray monotony of poplars; the tide flowing higher, laving the reeds, the sallows, all pallid with mist and soft driving rain.
Blessings on the cheerless days of rain, and even of sleet and hail, that would shove the reluctant year back into January. The fair face of Spring, with her tears dropping upon her quenchless smiles, peeped in suppressed triumph from behind the growing corn and the budding sallows on the river-bank.
A spurt was made in the early morning, the trackers first following a bank overgrown with alders and sallows, all of a size, which looked exactly like a well-kept hedge, but soon gave way to the usual dense line of poplar and spruce, rooted to the very edges of the banks, which are low compared with those of the Athabasca.
The present owner of Froom-Everard a non-resident had been improving his property in sundry ways, and one of these was by dredging the stream which, in the course of years, had become choked with mud and weeds in its passage through the Sallows. The process necessitated a reconstruction of the waterfall.
A twist of gold was round her hair; a robe Of samite without price, that more exprest Than hid her, clung about her lissome limbs, In colour like the satin-shining palm On sallows in the windy gleams of March: And while she kiss'd them, crying, 'Trample me, Dear feet, that I have follow'd thro' the world, And I will pay you worship; tread me down And I will kiss you for it'; he was mute: So dark a forethought roll'd about his brain, As on a dull day in an Ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence."
This laxity of emotional tone was further increased by an incident, when, two days later, she kept an appointment with Nicholas in the Sallows. The Sallows was an extension of shrubberies and plantations along the banks of the Froom, accessible from the lawn of Froom-Everard House only, except by wading through the river at the waterfall or elsewhere.
It happened to be market-day, and Nicholas, having postponed the engagements which called him thither to keep the appointment with her in the Sallows, rushed off at the end of the afternoon to attend to them as well as he could.
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