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landscape again. The great plain was braided white with clover, sweetening the air with its peculiar manna fragrance, and harvested by countless reapers in the shape of velvet-coated bees. The solemn purple mountains seemed to have floated away farther into the distance; sometimes a long shaft of sunlight would pierce the veil of haze and bring them visibly nearer, as if within reach of one’s hand. Here and there a faint white pillar of smoke rose like the sign of a sacrificial altar from the stairs and peaks of the ranges, but the time of bush-fires was not yet come. Hardly more substantial than the rings of smoke, airy fragments of thistle-down slowly wavered and balanced in the wind, in a constant feathery mist, and floated away to sea. The sight of these elfin plumelets brought back to Alice’s mind the early days of her arrival. She had passed the best part of a year now in this quiet green corner of earth, and she felt reluctant to leave it. But as Mrs. Austin had observed, the time of their departure was drawing nigh, and this place would soon know them no more for ever. There was something sad in this idea. The locusts in the pine-trees near the road continued their intensely shrill, throbbing chant as she rode past, and the tiny bush-wren warbled his one little sad tune