United States or Guam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The monotonous Bucskak which extended desolately, like a billowy sandy ocean, to the very horizon, were overgrown with dwarf firs that looked more like shrubs than trees. Not a village, not a hut was anywhere to be seen. From the roadside sedges, flocks of noisy wild-geese, from time to time, flew across the sky which the setting sun coloured yellow.
Just in front lay a clear lake of about a mile in extent, and the evening was so still that every tree, stone, and bush on its margin, was reflected as in a mirror. Here, hundreds of wild ducks and wild geese were feeding among the sedges of the bays, or flying to and fro mingling their cries with those of thousands of plover and other kinds of water-fowl that inhabited the place.
I looked upon the scene before me upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain, upon the bleak walls, upon the vacant eye-like windows, upon a few rank sedges, and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideous dropping off of the veil.
He knew the sedges along the bank with their nodding tassels and stiff lance-like leaves, the feathery grasses, the velvet moss upon the wet stones, the sea-green lichen on boulder or tree-trunk. There, in that corner of Echo Lake, grew the thickest patch of pipewort, with its small, round, grayish-white, mushroom-shaped tops on long, slender stems.
But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with dew; and instead of the groaning of the pit-engine, they heard the skylark, saying his matins high up in the air, and the pit-bird warbling in the sedges, as he had warbled all night long. All else was silent. For old Mrs.
Mention of him; and also considerable sulky humor, of the Majesty's-Opposition kind, on Schulenburg's part; for which reason, and generally as a poor direct reflex of time and place, reflex by ruffled bog-water, through sedges, and in twilight; dim but indubitable, we give the Letter, though the Prince is little spoken of in it: No. 3.
One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to death. They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road. No wild flowers, however wild, are rebels.
Several species of sedges, and nutritious grasses, grew round the holes in which the water was constant. At about fifteen miles from the camp, the creek was joined by that which I had followed for some distance on the 15th December, and, about three miles farther down, it receives another considerable tributary; and, at their junction, it is a fine sheet of water.
It is then that they are most easily shot, a solitary hunter oftentimes shooting thirty or forty in a single day. Their nests on the rushy margins of lakes and streams, far from being hidden like those of most birds, are conspicuously large, and conical in shape like Indian wigwams. They are built of plants rushes, sedges, mosses, etc. and ornamented around the base with mussel-shells.
Such a glorious death was by no means his ideal. When the battle was raging its fiercest, when the opposing warriors fell upon each other tooth and nail, and there was such a whirring and clashing of lances and battle-axes that it was as much as a man could do to avoid having an eye knocked out then, I say, Simplex, without thinking twice about it, sprang nimbly from his nag, unbuckled both his kettle-drums, left his steed to its own devices, hid the trumpet in the bushes, and crept himself into a place where the reeds and sedges were thickest.
Word Of The Day