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The bird of the pasture-land is singing still, perhaps, but all at once I have ceased to hear him, for something has come to lift me above his low grassy level, something faint and at first only the suspicion of a sound; then a silvery lisping, far off and aerial, touching the sense as lightly as the wind-borne down of dandelion.
Sanine watched him and then in leisurely fashion he also undressed, and took a header into the deeper part of the stream. "You'll be drowned," cried Ivanoff, "No fear!" was the laughing rejoinder, when Sanine, gasping, had risen to the surface. The sound of their merry voices rang out across the river, and the green pasture-land.
The features, great green expanses of rolling pasture-land, bisected by eye-contenting hedges of commingled new-gold and old-gold gorse and a lovely lake. One must put in the pause, there, to fetch the reader up with a slight jolt, and keep him from gliding by without noticing the lake.
The tree was on the edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly down to the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the narrow valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose loud, unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the voice of some tradition of nature that he could not understand.
From the comparative researches which he has made regarding the product of the agro romano when in a state of cultivation and its product when left as pasture-land, he has found that the GROSS product would be twelve times larger in the former case than in the latter; but, as cultivation demands relatively a greater number of hands, he has discovered also that in the former case the NET product would be less.
It was on the other side of the river from the village, and was by the road full two miles distant. It had been a poor place when they took possession of it; and it was a poor place still though Morely's skilful hands had greatly improved it. In summer it was a very pleasant place. Behind it lay a wide stretch of sloping pasture-land, and the forest crowned the hill.
The long sweeping step; the supple bend of the fetlock as it gave like a wire spring under the weight of great broad quarters, all sinewy strength and tapered perfection; the stretch of gentle-curved neck, sweet-lined as a greyhound's, bearing a lean, bony head, set with two great jewels of eyes, in which were honesty and courage, and eager longing for the battle of strength and stamina, and stoutness of heart; even the nostrils, with a red transparency as of silk, spread and drank eagerly the warm summer air that was full of the perfume of new-growing clover and green pasture-land.
It is sad to turn from the cloudy sky and sombre landscape; from yonder hill, with its crown of rusty, black pines, the foliage of which is so dismal in the absence of the sun; that bleak pasture-land, and the broken surface of the potato-field, with the brown clods partly concealed by the snowfall of last night; the swollen and sluggish river, with ice-incrusted borders, dragging its bluish-gray stream along the verge of our orchard like a snake half torpid with the cold, it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so little comfort and find the same sullen influences brooding within the precincts of my study.
This is proved, in my experiments, by a number of hungry caterpillars that, after a long fast, pass close beside a pine-branch without betraying any eagerness of showing a sign of stopping. It is the sense of touch that tells them where they are. So long as their lips do not chance to light upon the pasture-land, not one of them settles there, though he be ravenous.
It is merely one of those quiet corners of flat, homely England, where man and beast seem on good terms with each other, where all green things grow in abundance, where from of old tilth and pasture-land are humbly observant of seasons and alternations, where the brown roads are familiar only with the tread of the labourer, with the light wheel of the farmer's gig, or the rumbling of the solid wain.
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