Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/74

50 two cows might be seen chewing fresh clover.

Blandine will remember for many years yet at Smaragdis the surroundings of the family farm in the Campine land. The Nethe runs not far from there, indulging in truant meanderings, one of its short branches disappears behind the little garden and loses itself in the marshy pastures. The green drevilles, or little alleys of hirsute alders and gibbous willows, which are surrounded in the season by sweet-smelling honeysuckle, accompany like jealous chaperons the course of the silvery stream, which, down below on the borders of the village, turns a water mill, to the great delight of a throng of children.

The manageress of Escal-Vigor recalls, behind the meadows and the farmlands, a melancholy stretch of heath, in the midst of which rises a round hillock, whereon black, unshapely junipers crouched, like an assembly of spooks, like will o'the wisps of the waste, around a solitary beech,—a tree so rare in this region, that a bird of passage alone must have let fall the seed.