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For interminable miles a vast icy plateau stretched before them a plain glistening with snow and reflecting like a burnished mirror the misty silveriness of the moon. Over the glacial expanse an eerily greenish phosphorescence, which palpitated and shifted at times with vivid splashes of opal and deeper tones of burning blue, hung low.

Some children began chasing each other in and out among the men and women. A few girls went down to the water's edge and threw in stones, laughing at the splashes they made. Then a young man found an empty bottle and flung it far out into the channel. Fifty or sixty men and women threw stones at it, laughing when shots went wide, cheering when some well-aimed stone set the bottle rocking.

The sound gradually died away and he could hear detached noises; great pines, broken rocks, and soil, rushing down behind the fallen mass. There were heavy splashes, and then a strange, unnatural silence. "It's finished," Festing remarked. "Rather alarming for the first time, but one gets used to it. You can put out the light and go back to bed." Charnock did so and soon went to sleep.

"I'll have to dry like washing does in the sun," she laughed, wringing her hair in her hand as she stood in a motionless little rock pool. The drops sparkled round her and, looking down at their little splashes, she caught sight of her reflection in the pool as she stooped forward to shake her hair. For a moment she stared, as Narcissus once stared.

This lighted London of some of its superfluous hordes, and lost Israel the subterranean society of his friends, the corporals and sergeant, with whom wandering forlorn through the black kingdoms of mud, he used to spin yarns about sea prisoners in hulks, and listen to stories of the Black Hole of Calcutta; and often would meet other pairs of poor soldiers, perfect strangers, at the more public corners and intersections of sewers the Charing-Crosses below; one soldier having the other by his remainder button, earnestly discussing the sad prospects of a rise in bread, or the tide; while through the grating of the gutters overhead, the rusty skylights of the realm, came the hoarse rumblings of bakers' carts, with splashes of the flood whereby these unsuspected gnomes of the city lived.

When he floundered forward the deer had gone, but something was smashing through the undergrowth up the face of the hill, and the weary man prepared for a grim effort as he saw the red trail it left behind. He fell headlong in a thicket where the splashes were warm upon the withered leaves, staggered up again, and presently reeled against a cedar on the crest of a depression.

There was less choice but more quiet, and soon I found that Erling knew more of the points of a steed than I did. A Dane is a born horse dealer. So I sent him one way while I went another, and when I was almost despairing of finding what I thought would suit me, he came in search of me, leading a great skew-bald horse, bright brown and white in broad splashes all over him, in no sort of pattern.

Jays called in the thickets where the maples flamed amid the green oaks, with irregular splashes of red and orange. The grass was crisp with frost under the feet, the road smooth and gray-white in color, the air was indescribably sweet, resonant, and stimulating. No wonder the man sang. He came Into view around the curve in the lane. He had a fork on his shoulder, a graceful and polished tool.

And above each of them, where once was only good music, good wines, beautiful flowers, and baccarat, now droop innumerable Red Cross flags. Against the snow-covered hills they were like little splashes of blood. War followed us into Italy. But from the war as one finds it in England and France it differed.

Rather should their footsteps lead them where the bobolink sings as he circles over a green meadow, and the blue water lilies stoop to kiss the brook that ripples through it; or where the fields of grain bend and billow in the summer breeze; or the old mill-wheel splashes, while the white flowers in the pond above smile in the sunlight.