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In one place you wind along a narrow strip of weed-grown ruin: on one side is the immensity of earth and sky, on the other a narrow chasm, which is bounded by an arch of enormous size, tinged by the many colored foliage and blossoms and supporting an irregular pyramid overgrown like itself with the all-pervading vegetation.
To-day, however, the weed-grown paths, the box-plants growing in the old basin, the orange-trees which alone marked the outline of the beds all seemed full of charm, instinct with a sweet and dreamy cosiness in which it was very pleasant to lull one's joy.
The gate-lodge was in ruins, and the weed-grown avenue was covered with cow-dung. 'Which of the girls do you like best? said Alice, who wished to cease thinking of the poverty in which the spinsters lived. 'Emily, I think; she doesn't say much, but she is more sensible than the other two. Gladys wearies me with her absurd affectations; Zoe is well enough, but what names!
Once, and not so many years before, the Bay Road was contemptuously referred to as "Poverty Lane" and dwellers along its winding, weed-grown track vied with one another in shiftless shabbiness. But now all shabbiness had disappeared and many-gabled "cottages" proudly stood where the shanties of the Poverty Laners once humbly leaned. Albert had known Jane Kelsey for some time.
But of course he may have shaved that off, and I suppose in the dark, and when one is in a hurry to earn a quarter, it's hard to say whether a man is tall or short. I wonder if this can be the person we're looking for?" Mark hardly knew what to do. He stood in the road, undecided, and fairly stared at the man, who had left the porch, and was walking down the weed-grown path.
The horse, too, was in sorry state. A weed-grown crevice had cheated him with its semblance to sound footing, and he lay with front leg broken, groaning a little now and then while the man talked and talked. And while he examined the two it seemed to Lance that Fate was pointing, and saying that here, too, was one of the inscrutable instruments by which he worked out the destinies of men.
In an otter the movement would not have been remarkable; in a boy Van Cheele found it sufficiently startling. His foot slipped as he made an involuntarily backward movement, and he found himself almost prostrate on the slippery weed-grown bank, with those tigerish yellow eyes not very far from his own. Almost instinctively he half raised his hand to his throat.
It proved to be a round keep of gigantic strength and height, approached by two courtyards and surrounded by the weed-grown and fragmentary traces of an extensive stronghold, nothing of which now remained save a few broken walls, three or four embrasured loopholes, an ancient well of incalculable depth, and the rusted teeth of a formidable portcullis.
With the decay of freedom, taste sank, and that so rapidly that Seneca and Lucan transgress nearly as much against its canons as writers two generations later. The flowers which had bloomed so delicately in the wreath of the Augustan poets, short-lived as fragrant, scatter their sweetness no more in the rank weed-grown garden of their successors.
The wealth, luxury, and gradual decline of the native population; the frightful climatic changes which swept the country like a mower's scythe; the rapid conversion of a vast continent, alive with millions of pleasure-loving people, into a silent wilderness, where the sun and moon look down in turn upon hundreds of weed-grown cities, all this is told by Noz-yt-ahl with force and accuracy.
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