Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She had a special purpose in walking over it now. She was carefully examining to see whether she could afford to sell to the Ortegas a piece of pasture-land which they greatly desired to buy, as it joined a pasturage tract of theirs.
But property had not as yet reached that stage of absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The woodland and pasture-land of an English village were still undivided, and every free villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The meadow-land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay-harvest to spring.
I tried to procure evidence as to how much mould is blown, whilst in the state of castings, by our wet southern gales to the north-east, over open and flat land, by looking to the level of the surface on opposite sides of old trees and hedge-rows; but I failed owing to the unequal growth of the roots of trees and to most pasture-land having been formerly ploughed.
Sometimes he and Sandy would stay in a spot a week, sometimes ten days; then onward and upward over the great plateaus of the mountains they made their way. These flat reaches of pasture-land were like huge steps. It was hard to realize that they were constantly climbing. Yet up, up, up they went! Each camp was several hundred feet higher than the last.
Elphinstone was, indeed, a world to itself: a long, rambling house, set on a hill, with white-pillared verandahs, closed on the side toward the evening sun by green Venetian blinds, and on the other side looking away through the lawn trees over wide fields, brown with fallow, or green with cattle-dotted pasture-land and waving grain, to the dark rim of woods beyond.
In another part of this field, which had formerly existed as a separate one, and which it was believed had been pasture-land for more than a century, trenches were dug to see how thick the vegetable mould was.
But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, watered by three pretty creeks, near one of which they erected an adobe hut.
After floundering through the swamp, we reached more savannahs, and then entered a beautiful valley, well grassed, and with herds of fine cattle, horses, and mules grazing on it. The grass was well cropped, and looked like pasture-land at home. The ground was now firmer, and we got more rapidly across it.
It should constitute the woodland, or if this is not possible, the pasture-land of the farm, for the grass roots protect the soil and prevent it from washing away, and the profits on the hay are at least as great as any other crop which could be grown on hill land.
Determined at once to prove the truth—or rather the falsehood—of her story, I hastened to Woodford as fast as my legs could carry me; first veering round by a circuitous course, but the moment I was out of sight of my fair tormentor cutting away across the country, just as a bird might fly, over pasture-land, and fallow, and stubble, and lane, clearing hedges and ditches and hurdles, till I came to the young squire’s gates.
Word Of The Day