A well-appointed
country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But
he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should
happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his--he had the
pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But the
bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but
a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no
longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to
death.
They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon
margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road. No
wild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and their primroses
are good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and then, though, one has a
kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees.
Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of
fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers
(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, with
which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes
seemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it.
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