Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
A little timber-and-plaster village peeps out from a tangle of plum-trees, and a way-side tavern, in comfortable recurrence, solicits concessions to the national custom of frequent refreshment. Gordon Wright, who was a dogged pedestrian, always enjoyed doing his ten miles, and Longueville, who was an incorrigible stroller, felt a keen relish for the picturesqueness of the country.
"Why not rather to his own camp, or to Malpas?" said Rose "dearest lady, believe, it will be for the best." "Wherefore not wherefore not? wherefore not leave him on the way-side at once, to the knife of the Welshman, and the teeth of the wolf?-Once twice three times has he been my preserver. Where I go, he shall go; nor will I be in safety myself a moment sooner than I know that he is so."
These waterways were covered with skiffs being pushed and rowed in every direction; the cheerful rowers calling to each other through the leafy screens separating one lane from another till the place was full of their happy chirruping. Every booth and way-side halting-place was thronged with these delicate and sprightly people, so friendly, so gracious, and withal so purposeless.
In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land?
There are many things to be said about his talent, some of which are not the easiest in the world to express. I shall not, however, make them more difficult by attempting to catalogue his contributions in these pages. A turning of the leaves of Harper brings one constantly face to face with him, and a systematic search speedily makes one intimate. The reader will remember the beautiful Illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's novel of Springhaven, which were interspersed with striking figure-pieces from the pencil of that very peculiar pictorial humorist Mr. Frederick Barnard, who, allowing for the fact that he always seems a little too much to be drawing for Dickens and that the footlights are the illumination of his scenic world, has so remarkable a sense of English types and attitudes, costumes and accessories, in what may be called the great-coat-and-gaiters period the period when people were stiff with riding and wicked conspiracies went forward in sanded provincial inn-parlors. Mr. Alfred Parsons, who is still conveniently young, waked to his first vision of pleasant material in the comprehensive county of Somerset a capital centre of impression for a painter of the bucolic. He has been to America; he has even reproduced with remarkable discrimination and truth some of the way-side objects of that country, not making them look in the least like their English equivalents, if equivalents they may be said to have. Was it there that Mr. Parsons learned so well how Americans would like England to appear? I ask this idle question simply because the England of his pencil, and not less of his brush (of his eminent brush there would be much to say), is exactly the England that the American imagination, restricted to itself, constructs from the poets, the novelists, from all the delightful testimony it inherits. It was scarcely to have been supposed possible that the native point of view would embrace and observe so many of the things that the more or less famished outsider is, in vulgar parlance, "after." In other words (though I appear to utter a foolish paradox), the danger might have been that Mr. Parsons knew his subject too well to feel it to feel it, I mean,
"Mind what you are doing, lady Cairnedge!" I cried. "The ground here will not carry the weight of a horse like yours." But as I spoke he gave in, and sprang across the ditch at the way-side. There, however, he stood. "You think to escape me," she answered, in a low, yet clear voice, with a cat-like growl in it. "You make a mistake!"
They were without coats, or in their shirt sleeves, as, in common parlance, is the phrase for such undress; and, having handkerchiefs tied round their heads, and carrying in their hands rough sticks, picked up by the way-side, for canes, they presented an appearance, as they leisurely came along up the ascending road, with occasional glances back towards the woods, that left Dunning and his companion wholly in doubt, while attempting to decide who or what they were.
As we returned to Thebes, my mother's request returned to my mind; I was young and thoughtless I picked up a stone by the way-side, took it with me, and when she asked me for the remembrance from Byblos I silently gave her the pebble from Thebes.
Words so full of feeling and reverence were more impressive falling from lips usually sparkling with gaiety and wit. We walked in silence up the gradual ascent, till we came to a fine old elm, branching out by the way-side, and we paused to rest under its boughs.
It falls on every leaf and shrub by the way-side; it is reflected from the crystal streams that, between grassy banks, wind amidst groves of fruit-trees into vineyards and flower-gardens. This is the place, this is the state, Of all that fear the Lord; Which men nor angels may relate With tongue, or pen, or word.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking