Here are the quotations for the coming week, May 5th to 12th.
1. He worked downstream, crouching behind the reed and meadowsweet; creeping
between a hornbeam hedge and a foot-wide strip of bank, where he could see
the trout but where they could not distinguish him from the background;
lying on his stomach to switch the blue-upright sideways through the
checkered shadows of a gravelly ripple under over-arching trees. But he had
known every inch of the water since he was four feet high…
2. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet
spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked
blue-bells nodded together…Still the track descended …As the light beat
across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which
sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances … blue, black, and
glistening - all of clipped yew … Across the lawn - the marshalled woods
besieged it on three sides - stood an ancient house of lichened and
weather-worn stone…
3. They entered the hall - just such a high light hall as such a house
should own. A slim balustered staircase, wide and shallow and once creamy
white, climbed out of it under a long oval window. On either side delicately
moulded doors gave onto wool-lumbered rooms, whose sea-green mantlepieces
were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids in low relief…
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The sources of last week's quotations, as a number of people have pointed
out, were:
1. 'The Crab that Played with the Sea, in Just So Stories'
2. 'Wee Willie Winkie' in the collection of that name.
3. 'Little Tobrah, in Life's Handicap'
All good wishes, John R
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