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He searched his pockets and found the desired implement, but he could not find paper. The lining of his cap occurred to him; it was soft and unfit for his purpose. Looking sadly round, he observed that the tree against which he leaned was a silver-stemmed birch, the inner bark of which, he knew, would serve his purpose.
It was a wood of beeches and limes, with here and there a light silver-stemmed birch just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs: you see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping from behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their soft liquid laughter but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye, they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe that their voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost bough.
Behind us straggling silver-stemmed birches sheltered the little log-house of Fairmead, which nestled snugly among them, with its low sod-built stable further among the slender branches behind. Trees are scarce in that region, and the settlers make the most of them.
Probably she was thinking that the hot sunlight after the shower made everything intensely vivid the silver-stemmed birches in this picturesque little dell rising gracefully into the keen blue of the sky; the diamond-starred bracken and grass shining after the wet; the clear, tea-brown water at her feet glancing in the sun; the green and bronze stones and pebbles showing clear at the bottom of the pellucid brook as it chased and danced on its way down to the Geinig.
She glanced at him now from time to time, her eyes returning always to the beauty of the subdued light where all about them silver-stemmed birches clustered like slim shining pillars, crowned with their autumn canopy of crumpled gold. "Enchantment!" she said under her breath. "Surely an enchanted sleeper lies here somewhere." "You," he observed, "unawakened." "Asleep? I?" She looked around at him.
The wild sweet harp-music floated out and went with them far across the plain. The road swerved still farther to the right, entering a wood of spicy evergreens and silver-stemmed birches. In its green depths song-birds held high carnival, and an occasional rabbit went scudding from hillock to covert. From the south a road ran up and crossed theirs, on its way to the fiord.
On the right, the fir wood is broken by coppices of silver-stemmed birches, and spaces of heather that shows a purple-brown against the gray of the reindeer moss out of which it springs. Tits swung and frolicked among the tree-tops, and a jay flew off noisily with a flash of azure wing-coverts and volley of harsh discordant cries.
That was well; she needed to breathe, to summon strength and common-sense, find out what had been done, what reasonless madness she had committed in the half-light of the silver-stemmed trees clustering in shameful witness on every hand.
It was a flat valley, on either side of which rose two ranges of hills, which were clothed to the top with trees of various kinds, the plain of the valley itself being dotted with clumps of wood, among which the fresh green foliage of the plane tree and the silver-stemmed birch were conspicuous, giving an airy lightness to the scene and enhancing the picturesque effect of the dark pines.
It was a flat valley, on either side of which rose two ranges of hills, which were clothed to the top with trees of various kinds, the plain of the valley itself being dotted with clumps of wood, among which the fresh green foliage of the plane tree and the silver-stemmed birch were conspicuous, giving an airy lightness to the scene and enhancing the picturesque effect of the dark pines.
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