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A nobleman's park with its beautiful idle acres, its deer, its pheasants, and its scurrying rabbits, is so much more pleasant to look at than a succession of market-gardens. Poachers, game-keepers, and squires are alike interesting, if only they would dress so that he could know them apart. He is enchanted with thatched cottages which look damp and picturesque.
But a fresher delight is to be found in the foot-paths, which go wandering away from stile to stile, along hedges, and across broad fields, and through wooded parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched cottages, ancient, solitary farm-houses, picturesque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely familiar features of English scenery that Tennyson shows us in his idyls and eclogues.
I started out to speak of the view typical China, deforested hills close by, all pockmarked at the bottom with graves, like animal burrows and golf bunkers; peasants' stone houses with thatched roofs, looking like Ireland or France; orchards of pomegranates with lovely scarlet blossoms and other fruits; some rice fields already growing, others being set out, ten or a dozen people at work in one patch; garden patches, largely melons; in the distance the wall stretching out for miles, a hill with a pagoda, a lotus lake, and in the far distance the blue mountains also the city, not so much of which was visible, however.
Rain or shine, that trot must be trotted, for there were those among us who would have tramped sulkily all day and sniffed the sniff of wrath at ivied church and thatched cottage were the acid of their natures not made frothy and light by the alkali of their morning paper.
The dove-cots buzzed with wooings; the eaves grew populous with swallows, and the thatched roofs of the pens and stables were covered with poultry grubbing for the earliest worm. It was the resurrection of nature, nowhere felt with such keen exhilarance as in arctic latitudes.
I wished to be sure if the gardens belonged to the people who lived in the thatched cottages, and I spoke across the hedge to a man who was digging potatoes in one of them, a man with a leather apron, marking him out as a shoemaker, and a merry, contented face. Yes, the gardens belonged to the cottages at the foot of the hill. All the cottages had gardens in Clones.
I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ." During this time Bunyan, though a member of the Bedford congregation, continued to reside at Elstow, in the little thatched wayside tenement, with its lean-to forge at one end, already mentioned, which is still pointed out as "Bunyan's Cottage."
There are plenty of trout in the stream." And she posted the letter herself at the little thatched post-office, with a small, strictly private smile. Oh, no, she wasn't bored, of course! But it would be rather fun if he came.
The birds of care build their nests amid the turrets of a palace as readily as in the thatched roof of a cottage. The cruel thorns "the cares of this life," as Jesus calls them which choke the good seed, sometimes spring up more easily within the carefully fenced enclosure of my lord's park than in the little garden plot of the keeper of his lodge.
It can be approached only by going a little higher, for it is built on a mound in the centre of the yard. The whole length of the one-storeyed, thatched buildings was without a tree or any dark corner where I could shelter. I was still hesitating, when suddenly a shadow passed across one of the windows.
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