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The continuity of this flowery zone is interrupted here and there, especially on the south side of the mountain, by wide swaths of coniferous trees, chiefly the sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce, silver fir, and incense cedar, many specimens of which are two hundred feet high and five to seven feet in diameter.
The blue lines were mowed down in swaths as though the giant figure of Death had suddenly swung his scythe from the fog banks in the sky. Again and again came those awful volleys of musketry and artillery cross-firing on the rushing lines. The men staggered and recovered, reformed and charged again over the dead bodies of their comrades carrying the crest for a moment.
We see the tree with its strange system of water-works, pumping the sap up through pipes and mains; we see the chemical laboratory in the branches mixing flavor for the orange in one bough, mixing the juices of the pineapple in another; we behold the tree as a mother, making each infant acorn ready against the long winter, rolling it in swaths soft and warm as wool blankets, wrapping it around with garments impervious to the rain, and finally slipping the infant acorn into a sleeping bag, like those the Esquimos gave Dr.
Our long-faded trails lie buried under wide alfalfa-fields and the paved streets of western Kansas towns. From the far springs that quenched our burning thirst comes water, trickling through a nickel faucet into a marble basin, now. Where the fierce sun seared our eyeballs, in a treeless, barren waste, green groves, atune with song-birds, cast long swaths of shade on verdant sod.
You couldn't argue the case with the farmer, as you do with me when I try to get you up early to go fishing; and you would get up and put on a pair of cowhide shoes, brown overalls, a hickory shirt with bed-ticking suspenders, and you would go out into a barnyard that smelled like fury, and milk nine or fifteen cows on an empty stomach; and while another hired man was taking the milk to a creamery, you would see that it was not daylight yet, but you would go in the kitchen and eat a slice of pork, and hurry about it, and then you would curry off the horses, and help hitch the team to a reaper; and just as it was getting light enough to see things, you would go out to a wheat field, and, after the old man had cut two or three swaths around the field, several of you would turn in to bind up the bundles.
Men fell here and there from the deadly minnie-balls, while great gaps or swaths were swept away in our ranks by shells from the batteries on the hills, or by the destructive grape and canister from the orchard. On marched the determined men across this open expanse, closing together as their comrades fell out.
The dark blue of the sea became lighter around the islands, melting from sapphire to turquoise to jade. The atolls were ringed with dazzling white surf and beach, and they all had cool green swaths of palm trees and underbrush. And each lagoon also had its varying shades of blue, like the outer sea. "I fear we may have trouble, my boy," said the Phoenix, as they scanned the empty beaches.
The girl, still carrying her pet dove, walked slowly along the narrow gravelled paths that encircled the flower- beds and box-borders, till, reaching a low green door at the further end of the garden, she opened it and passed through into a newly mown field, where several lads and men were about busily employed in raking together the last swaths of a full crop of hay and adding them to the last waggon which stood in the centre of the ground, horseless, and piled to an almost toppling height.
In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house.
A day and a half of clear weather followed; but showers came before the sodden swaths could be shaken up and the moisture dried out, and then dull or wet days followed for a week longer; that is, to the twenty-first of the month. Not a hundredweight of hay had we put into the barn, and the first hay we had mown had spoiled in the field.
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