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Updated: May 6, 2025
The road through the forest reaches the highest points, because it is at the highest points that the Chinese forts are situated, either on the road or on some elevated clearing near it. The forts are stockades inclosed in wooden palisades, and guarded by chevaux de frise of sharp-cut bamboo. The barracks are a few native straw-thatched wooden huts.
The little straw-thatched farm houses with their small paned windows frequently filled with flowers in bloom, nestling in gardens and shrubberies and orchards, had a more or less comfortable and homey look during the day time; but at dusk when the light was failing and the lamp light shone through the windows, these farm houses took on a wonderfully attractive and romantic appearance.
When I think back at all, rather do I think far back to my childhood at the skirts of my milk-skinned, flaxen-haired, buxom English mother. It is a tiny village of a dozen straw-thatched cottages in which I lived. I hear again blackbirds and thrushes in the hedges, and see again bluebells spilling out from the oak woods and over the velvet turf like a creaming of blue water.
I pictured to myself a set of inhabitants and a mode of life for every habitation that I saw, from the aristocratical mansion, amidst the lordly repose of stately groves and solitary parts, to the straw-thatched cottage, with its scanty garden and its cherished woodbine.
These black fellows danced and sang, scratched around in the earth from which they had cleared the trees and underbrush; they watched things grow, and when they had ripened, they cut them down and put them in straw-thatched huts. They made bows and spears and arrows, poison, cooking pots, things of metal to wear around their arms and legs.
There in the lap of the hills around stood the wretched straw-thatched huts of the peasants belonging to the castle miserable serfs who, half timid, half fierce, tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard soil barely enough to keep body and soul together.
The folk-song tells what was the matter with the old one "with wall of clay, straw-thatched and grim": The wall it was mouldy and foul and green, And rent with a crack full deep; Time gnaweth ever with sharper tooth, Leaves little to mend, I ween. Nothing was left to mend in the church of Fjenneslev, so she must build a new.
Through the hot paved streets, over a floating bridge, past the cliff at the river's mouth, through a shady grove of noble yews and sycamores, past a picturesque hamlet full of vine-curtained and straw-thatched cottages, through a forest of oaks and past a willow copse, and there is the grand old ruin of Netley Abbey lifting its picturesque and solemn fingers of ivy-hung stone above the tops of the trees which surround and shelter it in its hoary age.
To begin with were fascinating cottages with neat little box-edged gardens and straw-thatched roofs; curious evergreen trees with stiff jointed branches known locally as monkey-puzzles; there were pretty children, some of whom waved hands of recognition; there were skylarks singing in the blue above, their happy notes falling like musical rain; there were big black and white magpies and black choughs, rooks and corbies, now known to the young people by their English names.
The swine were squealing in their styes, the cattle bawled about the straw-thatched barns in Chapel lane, and long files of gabbling ducks waddled hurriedly down to the river through the primroses under the hedge. He could hear the milkmaids calling in the meadows; and when he trundled slowly home the smoke was creeping up in pale-blue threads from the draught-holes in the wall.
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