“I’m feeling heaps better,” he thought. “Only let me get six months in these jolly old pine forests, living like a wood-cutter. The life of nature, that’s what I need to make a new man of me. Ah! this is my country. I’m here now; and here I’ll stay.”
Looking at that sky so invincibly blue, that soil so subjugated by the sun, it seemed hard to believe that elsewhere there could be fog and cold and sleet. Here the sunshine was of so conquering a quality, it was difficult to think of sullen lands that could resist it.
Again Hugh felt that sense of familiarity: “I’m a son of the sun,” he exulted; “a child of the sun-land.”
So absorbed was he that a rasping voice at his side almost startled him.
“The verdure here is profligate, ain’t it?”
The speaker was a rusty, creaky man smoking a rank cigar. He had a bony nose, and a ragged moustache. He wore a dusty bowler hat and a coat with a collar of hard-bitten musk-rat.
“The pines do seem to thrive,” said Hugh.
“Pines is very tendatious,” observed the shabby man. “Very saloobrious too.”
“Indeed,” said Hugh. “Are you a health-seeker?”
“No, sir. Not ’ealth,—wealth. I’m a man with a system, I am. The finest system on the Riviera.”