Algernon Blackwood

“ The scholar or student, doubtless, with facts all neatly labelled and docketed, might have had no trouble with the surging suggestions that swamped an untutored mind, but I know, at any rate, it was a relief to focus the brain on some simple common object⁠—such, for instance, as the charming little Georgian children, in rags and bare-footed, who crowded the platforms like bright eyed, nimble-footed elves, and offered mountain strawberries, cherries thickly stuck on waving reds a yard long, and handfuls of wild asparagus at something less than a farthing for more than one could eat. ”

“ At one of the last little stations, before the forests were gone, however, there entered the train one of the tribe of Georgian mountain Jews, his hands full of handkerchiefs and little shawls of the most delicate colored silk imaginable. It was like foam⁠—light as the cigarette smoke he puffed incessantly. He was a born and most persistent salesman, and had ever new arrangements and groupings of his various articles to tempt one, all handmade in his native village. ”

“ The wild confusion of box, azalea, rhododendron, fig, eucalyptus, almond, jasmine, aloes, huge chestnuts, and acacia, choked with vines and flowering creepers, rising out of a sea of giant bracken and utterly smothered in wild roses, leaves upon the mind a vague sense of a world suffocated under too many leaves, and not even the vile stench of the oil from the engine can prevent a hundred strangely mingled perfumes from flooding the air of the carriage. ”