was a glorious day, with the air so bright, elastic, and inspiriting that the young officers of the garrison felt their position irksome in the extreme. For the Colonel’s orders were stringent. The limits allowed to officer or man outside the walls were very narrow, and all the time hill, mountain, forest, and valley were wooing them to come and investigate their depths.
It was afternoon when Roberts, Bracy, and Drummond, being off duty, had strolled for a short distance along the farther side of the main stream, and paused at last in a lovely spot where a side gorge came down from the hills, to end suddenly some hundred feet above their heads; and from the scarped rock the stream it brought down made a sudden leap, spread out at first into drops, which broke again into fine ruin, and reached the bottom like a thick veil of mist spanned by a lovely rainbow. The walls of rock, bedewed by the ever-falling water, were a series of the most brilliant greens supplied by the luxuriant ferns and mosses, while here and there, where their seeds had found nourishment in cleft and chasm, huge cedars, perfect in their pyramidal symmetry, rose spiring up to arrow-like points a hundred, two hundred feet in the pure air. Flowers dotted the grassy bottom; birds flitted here and there, and sang. There was the delicious lemony odour emitted by the deodars, and a dreamy feeling of its being good to live there always amidst so much beauty; for other music beside that of birds added to the enhancement – music supplied by the falling waters, sweet, silvery, tinkling, rising and falling, mingling with the deep bass of a low, humming roar.
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