The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (10.1896)

“ Sub Tegmine Fagi ”

By Marie Clothilde Balfour

he sun strikes full upon a hillside sloping to the east, and

backed by long, swelling moorlands ; there are firs on the
western edge of the path, that guard a fragrant silence in their
brown, cool shadow ; but here one can catch the rustle of their
quivering needles aloft, where the breeze from the sea whispers to
them and brings gossip from their cousins in far countries. And
below there is grass, stretching widely, and falling to a little wood
of oaks and beeches, and an up-thrust cliff, along whose face
young foxes gambol and scamper ; and again an undulation of
young grass, and a swaying corner of green corn, and woods, and
further cliffs, till the land ends abruptly in a line of amethyst sea
that itself fades into the pearl and primrose of the far horizon,
and there is not a house to break the beauty of it—not a house,
though out of those further trees there is a faint line of smoke
rising, that is dimly white against the green ; and round the
corner, behind the edge of the hill, there is a little sleepy town
huddled in the hollow ; but here there is not a house anywhere
set as a pock-mark upon the summer face of nature. There are
birds, busy below us ; amid the trees and round the tufts of gorse,
plovers are calling to each other ; and behind, on the moor, one
hears sometimes the shrill, sad cry of the curlew ; and from the