Bunt

“ The material of which the flag is made must stand severe tests, for there are storms to be weathered and a sixty mile gale can whip average cloth to tatters. A strip of bunting two inches wide must have a strength of sixty-five pounds when proved on the testing machine. Two inches of filling must stand forty-five pounds. The bunting is American made and all wool and nineteen inches wide. It is washed for twenty-four hours in soap and fresh water and next day given a like treatment with salt water. ”

“ Upper parts yellowish brown with dusky spots; under parts yellowish white spotted and streaked with dusky. Length, seven and a half inches.
The present species is the largest of our five buntings, and is the most generally diffused throughout the British Islands. It is often called the common bunting, but is scarcely deserving of the name, as in most places it is less common than the yellow bunting. It is certainly more local than that bird, although in some localities, both in the south and north of England, it is more numerous than any other bird of its genus. ”

“ The gay Bunting erects his white crest, and gives utterance to the joy he feels in the presence of his brooding mate. The Willow Grous on the rock crows his challenge aloud. Each floweret, chilled by the night air, expands its pure petals; the gentle breeze shakes from the blades of grass the heavy dewdrops. ”

“ Even in species widely remote there is great similarity of procedure, and the behaviour of the Buntings is typical of that of many. With the rise of the appropriate organic state the male resorts at daybreak to a suitable environment, occupies a58 definite position, and singling out some tree or prominent bush, which will serve as a headquarters, advertises its presence there by song. ”

“ Bunting had made a great deal of money, and most of all she wondered about the man at the next table whose voice was like—like a dream which she did not know that she had dreamed. ”

“ So she filled her apron with sand, and ran down to the sea-side. But a hole came in the apron, and the sand which ran out formed a hill at Sagard. The giant maiden said, "Ah! now my mother will scold me!" Then she stopped the hole with her hand and ran on again. But the giant mother looked over the wood, and cried, "You nasty child! what are you about? Come here, and you'll get a good whipping." The daughter in a fright let go her apron, and all the sand ran out, and made the barren hills near Litzow, which the white and brown dwarfs took for their dwelling-place. ”

“ But let me not be led astray by the garden. I must be firm and confine myself to the Robin. The garden shall be another story. There were so many people in this garden—people with feathers, or fur—who, because I sat so quietly, did not mind me in the least, that it was not a surprising thing when I looked up one summer morning to see a small bird hopping about the grass a yard or so away from me. ”

“ Yet often at night when the tempest howls and the thunders roar, his form, or shadow, or image, or whatever it be, is seen to stride this valley in which we ride, on his swift bob-tail nag. When a Buckner’s Creek baby cries, whether from pure perverseness or from colic, only say to him ‘Strap Buckner’ once, and he will forthwith scrooch up in his cradle, and you will hear no more from that baby for hours. ”

“ A desolate field, a pair of crippled trees stretching their 253 naked branches to the dark-grey sky, a swarm of crows and a drenched road marked with the tracks of wheels, a tawny yellow patch of light gleaming through the cloud-bank and reflected in the wayside puddles, such are the elements out of which one of Munthe’s landscapes is composed. ”

“ Bunker.
“I’ll get your children to show me as nearly as they can the place the bees stung this peddler boy, and I’ll look around there for my missing swarm and the queen. They must have made a home for themselves in some hollow [Pg 243] tree, those bees must, and when the boy wandered too near it they swarmed out and stung him, for they thought he was after the honey they had stored there.” ”

“ Diverging occasionally from, but generally following the line of the shaft, you pass several old “bunnins”—I am not sure about the orthography, but the derivation is, I fancy, from bound in—which are short logs of wood jammed between the opposite walls of rock for the miners to stand upon when working in such situations. As you proceed on your perilous journey, you must not allow the thundering echoes of the distant blast, or the astounding rattle of the rapidly descending kibble and its chain, to deprive you of your presence of mind, else you are “but a dead” tourist. ”

“ Standing in the very centre of the scene, like some still lingering remnant of the long gone and almost forgotten past, arose the tall, rustic arm of an old-fashioned well-sweep, that raised or lowered a moss-covered, old oaken bucket, filled to overflowing and dripping wet with cool, clear water, not unfrequently visited by this gamboling group of merry children both during and after their play. ”

“ Those steep, green banks—for the rock, except in smooth, unclimbable patches, is covered with lush grass—have no appearance of an edge, and I have often shuddered, whilst plodding mechanically upwards, to find myself but just awakened from a reverie, within a yard or so of their soft-curled, lap-like crests. ”

“ Our road after this, till six o'clock in the evening, lay through the most exquisite forests, but with terrible footing for the mules—thick, pudding-like, wet mud, and loose, slippery stones, corduroys of hard mud striping some of the most difficult places, where only a surefooted mule can tread. ”

“ Some butcher boys, also returning from their night's work at market, were next on the ground, and selected adjacent awning posts and trees, as good points of observation. Mechanics and shop girls, going to their labor, recklessly postponed the duties of the day, and stopped to stare, awestricken, at the house.
A knot of people in a street, is like a drift of wood in a river. It chokes up the stream, and catches all the other wood that is floating down. ”

“ The sleigh was covered, but I could look out in front and see the plucky creatures scrambling up a bank after they had extricated us from the great drift at the bottom of the gully. If there had been a tree to guide us, or had it been daytime, it would not have seemed so hopeless a journey. ”

“ Our horizon is never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door, nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature. ”

“ A voice called merrily,
“To squeeze my stem you’d better refrain,
For everything I touch, I stain;
I make no exception for any one.
My leaf grows long after my flower is gone;
I am white with gold centre; does it pay
To bloom, as I do, for a single day?”
All the Bunnies examined the Blood root with the leaf circling round the stem, and the delicate flowers. ”

“ The wind sends one tremendous wave after another to help them, and as a great roller breaks and recedes, all the little crested waves scrabble with might and main, pulling at the softened sand, until, after hours of this labor, the cut is made completely through from sea to pond. ”

“ In some places (where the poles are full-grown) the upper branches rub against each other, causing a weird creaking in a gale. The trees as the wind rises find their voices, and the wood is full of strange tongues. From each green thing touched by its fingers the breeze draws a different note: the bennets on the hillside go ‘sish, sish;’ the oak in the copse roars and groans ”

“ I saw first the pale blue sky through a net of heather, then a big shoulder of hill, and then my own boots placed neatly in a blaeberry bush. I raised myself on my arms and looked down into the valley, and that one look set me lacing up my boots in mad haste. ”

“ On one day it would appear as smooth and unbroken as a village pond, on another the white expanse would be broken by ripples, solid wavelets stirred up by a light breeze, while after a storm, billows and rollers in the shape of great drifts and hillocks would obstruct our progress. ”

“ Not for me the shaded arches of the wood where glad birds piped, nor the velvet hillsides tufted with green and yellow and brown, nor eke the quiet lane running between walls of foliage, where simple rabbits scampered, amazed but not yet taught their fullest fear.
The butterflies we must chase hovered rather along urban ways. ”

“ Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades—they came alive day by day, hour by hour. ”

“ At last the horses began to go more slowly, as if they were climbing up-hill, and presently there seemed to be no more hedges and no more trees. She could see nothing, in fact, but a dense darkness on either side. ”

“ And thou wilt see a black man of great stature on the top of the mound. He has but one foot, and one eye in the middle of his forehead. He is the wood-ward of that wood. And thou wilt see a thousand wild animals grazing around him. Inquire of him the way out of the glade, and he will reply to thee briefly, and will point out the road by which thou shalt find that which thou art in quest of.’
“And long seemed that night to me. And the next morning I arose and equipped myself, and mounted my horse, and proceeded straight through the valley to the wood, and at length I arrived at the glade. ”

“ As we shoved away from the rocks in the morning the small green bittern, the genius of this shore, stood probing the mud for its food,—a melancholy contemplative bird, with ever an eye upon us, though so industriously at work. ”

“ Shielding ourselves in a low coppice of bushes from the peculiar light, which was sensibly increasing in strength and which seemed less softened by the interposition of veils of mist and cloud, we could just see, like a black ribbon painted along the horizon, a zone of tree tops. ”

“ The big windlass, with its coil of seemingly never-ending chain, winding and unwinding, lowering and raising the old, oaken bucket green with age, full and flowing; the cooling water oozing between the age-warped staves, nurturing the green grasses growing about the box-like enclosure. ”

“ We suddenly turned northwards into a tangled mass of tall fœtid reeds, rank jungle, and forest. One constantly feels, in malarious places, suddenly poisoned as if by miasma; a shudder runs through the frame and a cold perspiration, like a prelude for a fainting fit, breaks from the brow. ”

“ Every river-bed was full of mighty reeds, whose stems clattered together when the wind blew like swords on shields, and every now and then a bit of forest was woven together with the ropey stems of giant creepers till no man or beast could have passed save for the paths which constant use had kept open through the mazes. ”

“ He saw no one as he forded the now turbulent stream and climbed the farther slope to the wood of hazels and ashes which clung like an eyebrow to the edge of a bare grey bluff, beneath which were the roofs of the rearmost outbuildings. ”

“ When the morning breeze rustles and tosses every leaf, the trunk with its branches stands still and immovable, and when autumn conies, though every leaf which once rustled falls to the ground and withers, the trunk waits for a new spring. ”

“ Before long a thick bed of reeds sprang up in the meadow, and as soon as it had gained its growth, began whispering the story, and has continued to do so, from that day to this, every time a breeze passes over the place. ”

“ We found ourselves at once on an apparently boundless plain, without a tree or a fence, or, with one or two exceptions, a house in sight. Instead of fences, the earth was sometimes thrown up into a slight ridge. ”

“ So he neither followed Betty nor went home; but, in dreadful doubt and great fear, he hung between the two courses in the banana grove, and shivered at the tree-trunks and the rustling leaves and the stray patches of moonlight. ”

“ A bound, leap, or skip, such as a flat piece of stone makes, when thrown obliquely along the surface of a pond: The bounds, which are made by balls, fired with small charges, and under angles of little elevation, either upon land, or water: Fire-works, which leap or roll on the ground. ”

“ The foundation is of mud with a superstructure of moss, elaborately lined with hair and feathers. Nothing can be more perfect and exquisite than the interior of one of these nests, yet a new one is built every season. ”

“ When alighted on a fence-stake by the road, or in a field, and one approaches them, they gradually move sidewise out of sight, peeping now and then to discover your intention; and when you are quite close and 142 opposite, lie still until you are past, when they hop to the top of the stake, and rattle upon it with their bill, as if to congratulate themselves on the success of their cunning. ”

“ The one who enchanted the peach and placed it here—in the exact center of the Great Orchard—so no one would ever find it. We birds didn't dare to eat it; we are too wise for that. But you are Button-Bright from the Emerald City, and you, you, YOU ate the enchanted peach! ”

“ If some of you could think of a good answer it would be a good riddle."
"Yes, I guess it would," agreed Mrs. [Pg 184] Bunker. "This is the time you didn't think of a good one, Laddie. A riddle isn't much good unless some one knows the answer."
Perhaps some of you who are reading this story can tell the answer.
Down on the beach went the six little Bunkers. There was a bright moon shining and here and there were other parties of children and young people, some going to have marshmallow roasts also, and some who only came down to look at the ocean shining under the silver moon. ”