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Updated: August 19, 2024
When I got to know him well, my favourite method, in learning of his ways, was to lie in wait at a spot commanding a view of one or other of the narrow lanes joining the main road of the riverside folk, and there, my face hidden by a convenient screen of interlacing grass-stems, to listen intently for his approach.
But just opposite was the tree whose refuge they had been trying to gain. They swam across in half-a-dozen strokes, and drew themselves ashore, and shook themselves like a pair of retrievers. Through all the flight, the fierce effort among the grass-stems, and the unexpected ducking, they had kept tenacious hold of every one of their treasures. But their fire was out!
Great rain-drops swung on the swaying grass-stems and twinkled with a thousand prismatic colours. The slow drip of the woods resounded in his ears. As his hearing sharpened, the old familiar sounds returned, the chirping of the titmice, the starling's discord, the sniggering of the robin, the squirrel's bullying cough.
Each, as it gained the entrance, performed its normal round. First it sniffed for weasel, then it sat up and washed its face, then it sniffed again, finally it stole off, foraging among the grass-stems.
I used to go away with a companion into a grass-field, and, selecting a spot where the grass was long and tangled, and mixed with various kinds of weeds, we used to lie flat down with our faces as near to the ground as possible, and gaze through the grass-stems until we fancied the blades were trees, and the pebbles were large rocks, and the clods were mountains.
This is a little, vase-shaped animal, which usually lives attached to grass-stems or sticks, but has the power to free itself and hang on the surface of the water or to slowly creep on the bottom. The mouth is at the top of the vase, and the simple, undivided cavity within the vase is the digestive cavity.
Mawg swam the creek, thrust his way through the grass-stems, darted back to snatch up his club, shook it at Grôm, and, yelling an obscene taunt, raced off to seek himself another retreat before nightfall. Neither Grôm nor A-ya had any heed to spare him at that moment. The monster had just torn down a limb so huge that the main trunk was almost split in half by its loss.
Morgan le Fay, Britomart, Vivien, Nimue, Merlin did not convince me; they were picturesque conventions whose decorative quality I felt, while so far as I was concerned they were garniture or apparatus. And yet the fruitful meadows through which I took my daily way were as forests to me; the grass-stems spired up to my fired fancy like great trees.
These objects are continually re-arranged, and carried about by the birds whilst at play. The bower of the Spotted bower-bird "is beautifully lined with tall grasses, so disposed that the heads nearly meet, and the decorations are very profuse." Round stones are used to keep the grass-stems in their proper places, and to make divergent paths leading to the bower.
The plains of Bengal were all but obscured by a dense haze, partly owing to a peculiar state of the atmosphere that prevails in the dry months, and partly to the fires raging in the Terai forest, from which white wreaths of smoke ascended, stretching obliquely for miles to the eastward, and filling the air with black particles of grass-stems, carried 4000 feet aloft by the heated ascending currents that impinge against the flanks of the mountains.
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