The sun shone pleasantly on the bright water, which was sometimes shaded by trees, and sometimes open to a wide extent of country, intersected by running streams, and rich with wooded hills,
cultivated land, and sheltered farms.
But when we compare the dray-horse and race-horse, the dromedary and camel, the various breeds of sheep fitted either for
cultivated land or mountain pasture, with the wool of one breed good for one purpose, and that of another breed for another purpose; when we compare the many breeds of dogs, each good for man in very different ways; when we compare the game-cock, so pertinacious in battle, with other breeds so little quarrelsome, with 'everlasting layers' which never desire to sit, and with the bantam so small and elegant; when we compare the host of agricultural, culinary, orchard, and flower-garden races of plants, most useful to man at different seasons and for different purposes, or so beautiful in his eyes, we must, I think, look further than to mere variability.
All that night we raced through the Barsoomian void, passing over low hills and dead sea bottoms; above long-deserted cities and populous centers of red Martian habitation upon the ribbon-like lines of
cultivated land which border the globe-encircling waterways, which Earth men call the canals of Mars.
A quarter of a mile intervened between the forest and the city wall--a quarter of a mile of
cultivated land unrelieved by a single tree.
Where vast stretches of
cultivated land were once seen, they have brought barrenness and devastation."
Beyond the Tournelles, as far as the wall of Charles V., spread out, with rich compartments of verdure and of flowers, a velvet carpet of
cultivated land and royal parks, in the midst of which one recognized, by its labyrinth of trees and alleys, the famous Daedalus garden which Louis XI.
Passing along the Ridgeway to the east, we soon come to
cultivated land. The downs, strictly so called, are no more.
Hence the need of the fortifications; hence the few houses and little
cultivated land without the limits of the walls; even the cattle are not safe from the attacks of the Indians beyond the boundaries of the plain, on which the fortress stands.
Micawber, looking round the room as if it represented several hundred acres of highly
cultivated land, 'on the first responsibility becoming due, have been successful in our harvest, or we might not have got our harvest in.
To the right was a scattered native settlement with a few stone cattle kraals and some
cultivated lands down by the water, where these savages grew their scanty supply of grain, and beyond it stretched great tracts of waving "veld" covered with tall grass, over which herds of the smaller game were wandering.
There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence." They who have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say, "On re-entering
cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp.
He would go down the hillside into the
cultivated lands by night, and look very curiously at the villagers in their huts, but he had a mistrust of men because Bagheera showed him a square box with a drop gate so cunningly hidden in the jungle that he nearly walked into it, and told him that it was a trap.