Over among them somewhere lay the blue lake. He could already hear the
murmur of its whispering shores, the roar of its circling forests, for
the trees followed on and over through some low defile as if loath to
lose the hills themselves, rising to heaven in virgin smoothness of
cloud-shadowed verdure.
The sun had gone behind them in splendid panoply of fire when he came
down into the sheltered woods, and through them to a wondrous meadow,
beautiful as the fields of Paradise, sloping, to the shore beyond where
waters blue as the sky above sent back the pageantry of light.
Here were the signs of tillage and cultivation, and even now a long
dark strip attested the spring's new work, sending forth on the evening
air the sweet scent of fresh-turned earth.
Beyond, across the field, in the edge of the farther woods, thin blue
smoke curled peacefully up from the pointed tops of some forty native
lodges, while nearer the lake there stood two cabins, one old and solid
with a look of having faced the elements for years, the other staring
in its newness. Indian ponies grazed at the clearing's edge or drank of
the rippling waters on the pebbly beach, and a plough lay in the last
furrow.
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