OUTDOORS 



this feeling, nor does the ocean, when one is 

 out of sight of land. It is not a feeling of 

 desolation, but one of age, as if the world 

 were a million times more ancient than man 

 had ever pictured it, and on the bosoms of 

 these hills lay brooding the shadows of un- 

 counted centuries. 



When the sun shines here he seems to send 

 his beams down from remoter heights than 

 elsewhere. There is a strange familiarity in 

 the shapes of the rolling mounds, as though 

 they might be the forms of mighty mammoths 

 engulfed by some prehistoric tide, which lay 

 down as the floods swept across them, per- 

 ished there, and became encysted in the debris 

 of the cycles that followed. On still days 

 there is a mournfulness that appeals to the im- 

 agination keenly. Bird life is very rare, only 

 the black wake of the buzzard, the varying 

 slants of a hawk's wing, and the flights of 

 wild- fowl to paint the skies; no last-year's 

 nests or stray feathers to tell of song-birds 

 lingering there. There is something high, 

 austere, and calm about these dumb wastes. 

 Down in the valleys the winds sleep by shal- 

 low creeks or hide in the rushes that line the 

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