Beauties

"There were about half a dozen men and Shasta had never sen anyone like them before.  For one thing, they were all as fair-skinned as himself, and most of them had fair hair.  And they were not  dressed like men of Calormen.  Most of them had legs bare to the knee.  Their tunics were of fine, bright, hardy colours--woodland green , or gay yellow, or fresh blue.  Instead of turbans they wore steel or silver caps, some of them set with jewels and one with little wings on each side of it.  A few were bare-headed.  The swords at their sides were long and straight, not curved like Calormene scimitars.

"And instead of being grave and mysterious like most Calormenes, they walked with a swing and let their arms and shoulders go free, and chatted and laughed.  Onde was whistling.  You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly and didn't give a fig for anyone who wasn't.  Shasta thought he had never seen anything so lovely in his life."

--The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis



an arch of giant lilac-bushes~

"The herb border ran wild, and the air smelled wonderful, the breezes aften stirred the piney, mossy smell of the forest with the sharp smell of herbs, mixed in the warm smell of fresh bread from the kitchen, and then flung the result over the meadow like a handful of new gold coins."

--Beauty, Robin McKinley

Odd perhaps, to take so many pictures of these houses, but I think they are lovely, and the lighting on my walk that morning was irresistable for taking pictures. I thought it gave a fairytale-ish quality to the trees and old victorian houses.