Then there were all the hushed
sounds of the country: the distant, quick footfall of a horse on some
dusty road; the warning cluck of a thrush to her young ones down there
among the bushes; the glad voices and laughter of some girls in an
adjacent garden--they, too, likely to be soon away from the maternal
nest; the crow of a cock pheasant from the margin of the wood; the
clear, ringing melody of an undiscoverable lark. Everywhere white light,
blue skies, and shadows of great clouds slow-sailing over the young
green corn and over the daisied meadows in which the cows lay
half-asleep. And when he looked beyond that low green hill, where there
were one or two hares hopping about on their ungainly high haunches, and
past that great stretch of receding country in which strips of
red-and-white villages peeped here and there from the woods, behold! a
horizon as of the sea, faint and blue and far, rising and ever rising in
various hues and tones, until it was lost in a quivering mist of heat;
and he could only guess that there, too, under the glowing sky, some
other fair expanse of our beautiful English landscape lay basking in the
sunlight and sweet air of the early summer.
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