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There were rail-fences around them, and a cleared space divided into fields, some of which appeared to be under cultivation, while others were green and filled with flocks of animals. The whole picture was exactly like a snug farm-house, with its stables and other outhouses, with its garden and fields, and horses and cattle!
There were dark stretches of forest on the hilltops and in the valleys; rivers filled with floating logs; sawmills beside the waterfalls; wooden farmhouses painted white; and rail-fences around the fields. The people seemed sturdy, prosperous, independent. They had the familiar habit of coming down to the station to see the train arrive and depart.
He looked out of the window of the train, and there was only the long line of white country broken by the leafless trees and rail-fences and the mansard-roofs and low cottages with their stoops, built up with earth to keep them warm; and the sheds full of cattle; and here and there a sawmill going hard, and factories pounding away and men in fur coats driving the small Indian ponies; and the sharp calls of the men with the sleigh bringing wood, or meat, or vegetables to market.
Moses tried shooting, which he had heard belonged to a country life; and he had a sort of design to set up as a fourth or fifth class country gentleman; but his legs were too short to clamber over high rail-fences with any comfort, and he gave up the amusement in despair.
"I remember, Lady Mary, first seeing humming-birds when I was about your age, while walking in the garden. It was a bright September morning, and the rail-fences and every dry twig of the brushwood were filled with the webs of the field-spider.
Their nests, well filled with eggs, were found along the rail-fences of the fields in the close vicinity of the marshes, for which level tracts they seemed to have strong attachment. They multiplied rapidly, and visited the cattle-pens and barn-yards of the plantation.
We were among cows and barns and homely rail-fences, and that was comfort; so we strolled contentedly through the pastures, found a river, I believe it was the Hudson; at any rate, Halicarnassus said so, though I don't imagine he knew; but he would take oath it was Acheron rather than own up to ignorance on any point whatever, watched the canal-boats and boatmen go down, marvelled at the arbor-vitæ trees growing wild along the river-banks, green, hale, stately, and symmetrical, against the dismal mental background of two little consumptive shoots bolstered up in our front yard at home, and dying daily, notwithstanding persistent and affectionate nursing with "flannels and rum."
When at last we gained the top, by dint of clambering over rail-fences and up steep slopes bestrewn with mulleins and boulders, and over patches of freshly-plowed hardscrabble, the sight was well worth the rough climb. The broad Ohio bottom, opposite, was thick-dotted with orchard clumps, from which rose the white houses and barns of small tillers.
It was the wildest ride that Montague ever had taken over ditches and streams and innumerable rail-fences, and through thick coverts and densely populated barnyards; but he was in at the death, and Alice was only a few yards behind, to the immense delight of the company.
Clean white shirt-sleeves are the symbol of our race's rustic Sunday leisure everywhere; and the main difference that I could note between our own farmer-folk and these was that at home they would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, and here they were hanging over gates; you cannot very well sit on the tops of hedges.
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