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Walking past the church, I followed the streamlet that runs through the town and out by a cleft between the hills to a narrow marshy valley, on the other side of which are precipitous hills, clothed from base to summit in oak woods.

When the first officers of the battalion caught sight of the little body stretched at the foot of the ash-tree and covered with the tricolored banner, they made the salute to it with their swords, and one of them bent over the bank of the streamlet, which was covered with flowers at that spot, plucked a couple of blossoms and threw them on it.

And what had the voice of the streamlet told him in the days long ago that the summer-time was made for happy lovers; that she was coming; that he should take her hand and show her the beautiful islands and the sunlit seas before the darkening skies of the winter came over them.

Another memory darted keen like steel through the young priest's mind that of the little black hen lying lifeless beside the shed, amidst the dismal surroundings of the osteria, with a tiny streamlet of violet blood trickling from her beak. And here again, Tata, the parrot, lay still soft and warm at the foot of her stand, with her beak stained by oozing blood.

"Here," said Boone, as himself and companions entered the streamlet, whose clear, bright waters, to the depth of some three inches, rolled merrily over a smooth bed, with a pleasing murmur: "Here, lads, I reckon we'll have difficulty; for the red varmints never enter a stream for nothing; and calculating pretty shrewdly they'd be followed soon, no doubt they've taken good care to puzzle us for the trail.

Two miles away, in the direction of the "run," there are on Woodboo plantation two similar basins connected by a shallow streamlet, and with no outlet which a minnow could navigate: one of them is large enough for a little skiff to float on, and the gray rock slopes down to a centre depth of ten feet.

So many are the villages, towns, and places of interest seen, so many the adventures met with in this walk, starting with the baby streamlet beyond Simonsbath, and following it down to Exeter and Exmouth, that it would take half a volume to describe them, however briefly. Yet at the end I found that Exford had left the most vivid and lasting impression, and was remembered with most pleasure.

But there is another more intimate union, and this is "like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and the rain-water cannot be divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the sea, which cannot afterwards be disunited from it; or it may be likened to a room into which a bright light enters through two windows though divided when it enters, the light becomes one and the same."

Bands of pink and crimson clouded the west, a thin cold wash of blue veiled the east; and overhead, bayward, landward, everywhere, the misting and the shadowing of the twilight. Between me and the white wave-bars at the end of the road gleamed a patch of silvery water the returning tide. As I watched, a silvery streamlet broke away and came running down the wheel track.

During a profound silence, in which nothing but the murmurs of the unconscious streamlet, or the chirping of birds might be heard, the combatants quitted their tents, to take individually the two first oaths. When the third oath was to be administered, it was customary for them to meet, and for the marshal to take the right hand of each and to place it on the cross.