United States or North Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Just trees and sky and wood-smoke and the ground underneath there's nothing like it in the world!" He had flushed up with enthusiasm. Marjorie looked at him admiringly. This was a new Francis, one she had never met. She had not realized that any one could love that sort of thing indeed, no one had ever told her that such things existed.
And there in the starlight, under the wide-gnarled pines, sighing low with the wind, Helen sat with Dale on the old stone that an avalanche of a million years past had flung from the rampart above to serve as camp-table and bench for lovers in the wilderness; the sweet scent of spruce mingled with the fragrance of wood-smoke blown in their faces. How white the stars, and calm and true!
But the wood-smoke that perfumed the air, sweetened it, the firelight wrapped it about, the pots and pans and simple things of life, amid which it passed, hallowed it.
The keen morning air, or something, makes a fellow mighty unromantic, too. Perhaps it was the thin blue wood-smoke from the field-stoves, and the smell of the hot coffee and the victuals the waiters are carrying about, some to the tent where the bare tables are for the canvasmen, some to the table covered with a red and white table-cloth as befits performers. These have no rosy cheeks.
The impedimenta of the little force, transport, field-hospital, and camp-followers, still trailed along a narrow lane leading from the kotal over which they had come, to the terrace itself. Already grey films of wood-smoke soared, plume-like, into the blue; and the air at ten of the morning was still keen with the sharpness of a small frost at high altitudes.
Presently he came to where the path kinked and sloped down among a jumble of rocks, and at the same moment he caught the pungent, comforting smell of wood-smoke on the fog. Then he knew that Chance Along the roof which sheltered Flora Lockhart lay hidden and dripping beneath him. He was about to commence a cautious descent of the path, when a clamor of voices drifted up to him.
The keen, acrid swirls of wood-smoke blew into his eyes, and the rank steam of yellow home-made soap, manufactured with bracken ash for lye, rose to his nostrils. Now, Ralph Peden was well made and strong.
One day, with Eye-o and Ear-o by his side, he sat on a great boulder and gazed gloomily down on the plain. Spring was just ripening into early summer, the plain was at its very greenest and loveliest, and here and there a little blue wood-smoke hung over the tiny villages. Giles thought of Phyllida far, far away, and a terrible loneliness poured into his heart.
In fact I loved the smell and color of wood-smoke, in spite of the fact that it made my eyes smart. By October first, which was the opening day of the hunting season, I had labored at various exercises until I felt fit to pack a rifle through the woods. R.C. and I went out alone on foot. Not by any means was the day auspicious.
And soon the feeling that I knew would come begins creeping over me, the sense of an extraordinary sanity in this never-ceasing harmonious labour pursued in the autumn air faintly perfumed with wood-smoke, with the scent of chaff, and whiffs from that black puffing-Billy; the sense that there is nothing between this clean toil not too hard but hard enough and the clean consumption of its clean results; the sense that nobody except myself is in the least conscious of how sane it all is.
Word Of The Day