What a soulless race that
plain must breed," I thought; "what soulless days are lived there;
peasants going forth at dusk to plough, and turning home at dusk to
eat, procreate and sleep." At last a river appeared flowing amid
sparse and stunted trees and reeds, a great wide sluggish river with
low banks, flowing so slowly that it hardly seemed to flow at all.
Rooks flew past, but they are hardly wilding birds; a crow--yes, we
saw one; and I thought of a heron rising slowly out of one of the
reedy islands; maybe an otter or two survives the persecution of the
peasant, and I liked to think of a poacher picking up a rabbit here
and there; hares must have almost disappeared, even the flock and the
shepherd. France is not as picturesque a country as England; only
Normandy seems to have pasturage, there alone the shepherd survives
along the banks of the Seine. Picardy, though a swamp, never conveys
an idea of the wild; and the middle of France, which I looked at then
for the first time, shocked me, for primitive man, as I have said, was
uppermost in me, and I turned away from the long plain, "Dreary," I
said, "uneventful as a boarding-house."
But it is a long plain that has no hill in it, and when I looked out
again a whole range showed so picturesquely that I could not refrain,
but turned to a travelling companion to ask its name.
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