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And then all at once there lay before me a fair green valley, with low shrubs, a clear, gently-flowing, winding stream, quiet houses and a few tall-stemmed tropical trees. An indescribable, deeply-significant calm and stillness reigned there. The land was populated and thickly settled, but enwrapped in a universal breathless consecration of peace and joy.
Between these two waters, the greater and the less, a waving palisade of tall-stemmed palm-trees rose on a narrow ribbon of circular land that formed the fringing reef. All night through he had felt, with a strange eerie misgiving, the very foundations of the land thrill under his feet at every dull thud or boom of the surf on its restraining barrier.
Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions, just as we see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain, "the white man's foot," as the Indians called it, the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement; all these plants, and many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.
The river Kurry continued to run along by our road. Not far from the station a long handsome bridge led across, but it was so awkwardly placed that it was necessary to go out of the way a whole werst to reach it. 6th September. The journey became still more romantic. Bushes and woods covered the hills and valleys, and the tall-stemmed, rich, green Turkish corn waved in the fields.
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