The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: sound except that of the stream. I was, however, in a different
country from the day before. The stony skeleton of the world was
here vigorously displayed to sun and air. The slopes were steep
and changeful. Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown,
wealthy in leaf, and touched by the autumn with strong and luminous
colours. Here and there another stream would fall in from the
right or the left, down a gorge of snow-white and tumultuary
boulders. The river in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a
river, collecting on all hands as it trotted on its way) here
foamed a while in desperate rapids, and there lay in pools of the
most enchanting sea-green shot with watery browns. As far as I
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