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The views range over an expanse of varying elevation, steep hills and deep valleys being frequent. There are numerous watercourses. The Huisne, which helps to feed the Sarthe, is itself fed by a number of little tributaries.

Then, to encourage the king's army further, to bring them all upon the enemy while he was in confusion, he quitted his horse, and fighting with extreme difficulty in his heavy horseman's dress, in rough uneven ground, full of watercourses and hollows, had both his thighs struck through with a thonged javelin.

Along our path are balsam-trees and thorny jujubes, from whose branches we pluck the sweet, insipid fruit as we ride beneath them. Herds of cattle are pasturing on the plain, and long rows of black Bedouin tents are stretched at the foot of the mountains. We cross a dozen murmuring watercourses embowered in the dark, glistening foliage of the oleanders glowing with great soft flames of rosy bloom.

With this in view, he led his army from before the town into a neighboring plain, called the Park, where nature had provided means of defence of which he might avail himself. The ground which his army here occupied was hard and dry. That in front of it, through which Edward's host must pass, was wet and boggy, cut up with frequent watercourses, and ill-fitted for cavalry.

You see more successful works the Professor's little private garden, which he is supposed to cultivate with his own hands; various little wells and watercourses among the rocks, moss-grown and fern-embowered; and so you come out on the moor. There great works go on.

Vast forests have disappeared from mountain spurs and ridges; the vegetable earth accumulated beneath the trees by the decay of leaves and fallen trunks, the soil of the alpine pastures which skirted and indented the woods, and the mould of the upland fields, are washed away; meadows, once fertilized by irrigation, are waste and unproductive because the cisterns and reservoirs that supplied the ancient canals are broken, or the springs that fed them dried up; rivers famous in history and song have shrunk to humble brooklets; the willows that ornamented and protected the banks of the lesser watercourses are gone, and the rivulets have ceased to exist as perennial currents, because the little water that finds its way into their old channels is evaporated by the droughts of summer, or absorbed by the parched earth before it reaches the lowlands; the beds of the brooks have widened into broad expanses of pebbles and gravel, over which, though in the hot season passed dryshod, in winter sealike torrents thunder; the entrances of navigable streams are obstructed by sandbars; and harbors, once marts of an extensive commerce, are shoaled by the deposits of the rivers at whose mouths they lie; the elevation of the beds of estuaries, and the consequently diminished velocity and increased lateral spread of the streams which flow into them, have converted thousands of leagues of shallow sea and fertile lowland into unproductive and miasmatic morasses.

Many of these watercourses may in former times have been larger and even navigable up to a point. Their flow is now obstructed, their volume diminished. I daresay they have driven the sea further out, with silt swept down from the uplands.

In these dry watercourses, among the sand ridges, beside the humid marshy hollows, and among the thick strips of grass jungle, tigers are always to be found. They are much less numerous now however than formerly. As a rule, there is no shelter in these water-worn, flood-ravaged tracts and sultry jungles.

Increase from an effectual blessing upon the means of grace in places where they are already enjoyed; the Lord saith, "I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my Spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offering; and they shall spring up as among the grass, as willows by the watercourses."

In the narrow, straight streets the carnage was fearful, and blood soon trickled down the watercourses and dyed the pavements. That morning the sun had risen for the last time upon six hundred strong men; it set upon their mangled remains. Six hundred souls! The Argentine soldier knows little of the science of "hide and seek" warfare. When he goes forth to battle, it is to fight or die.