landscape; to-day there are only shepherds of three days' unshornness;
the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in the
cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of the
horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks
of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse
stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure
but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene.
There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering
about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or
westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something
which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first
it is not distinguishable from it, btit which as your train passes
nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without a tree or
a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of
living men. You pull yourself together in the effort to visualize the
immeasurable fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of
harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual
nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you think
of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a
relief to the spectator.




I


At times and in places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces
with the sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was
not yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it