Another room was large and light built in the manner
of one hundred and fifty years ago, which people call Georgian. It had
been thrown out south (which is quite against our older custom, for our
older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a
corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still). It had
round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have
called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house
had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it
had a great steading and there was a copse and some six acres of land.
Over a deep ravine looked the little town that was the mother of the
place, and altogether it was enclosed, silent, and secure.
"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a
Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those
six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering
town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond, will not
be mine.
For all I know, some man quite unacquainted with that land took them
grumbling for a debt; or again, for all I know, they may have been
bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who,
seeing them, perpetually regretted the flat marshes of the fens. One
day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap
in the trees I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other,
the forests wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range
guarding all, and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the
little Sabine Farm.
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