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VAL OF PARADISE CHAPTER I JOHN HANNON'S firmament

PARADISE! What words shall one choose to tell of it and those who made it—of its beauty, its strength and its arrogance?

In a land where distance hazed the southern skyline, where tawny buttes and mesas stood majestically against the blue, where bunch-grass levels swept toward the illimitable west and the Blind Trail Hills rose stark and forbidding upon the east, it lay like the heart of peace itself, smiling in the sun, green with its wide alfalfa fields beneath its living waters. Tall cottonwoods weaved and whispered in the little winds that blew always from the south and a high-topped palm or two stood like sentinels to guard its gates. Where Bluewater, the great sweet spring that boiled eternally in its stone-flagged patio, ran out beneath the trees, there purple iris grew beside the trickle, and water hyacinth.

Worn, old-fashioned chairs and benches stood hospitably on the clean-swept earth where the poplars made their shaking shade, and hammocks, gay with fringe, swung in the little breezes.

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