Here are the quotations for the coming week (July
25th to 31st):
1. '...It was a slope of gap-edged fields possessed
to their centres by clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined,
cattle-rubbed posts leaned out and in…In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead
stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the
bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge and frothed in
the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond - old, tall, and
brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house...'
2. '...Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital
of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake,
boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous
brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
them again; tithe barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried
aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple...'
3.
'...the life of the English road, which to me is one renewed and unreasoning
orgy of delight. The mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association;
their natural enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate
market-day cattle, broadside on at all corners, the bicycling butcher's boy a
furlong behind; road engines that pulled giddy-go rounds, rifle galleries and
swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in defiance of the
notice-board; traction -engines, their trailers piled high with road metal;
uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute miles, flitting by on their
wheels…'
The sources of last week's extracts (July 18th to
24th) are as follows:
1. (...He leaned forward, but his eye was caught by
the setting sun. It had come down to the top of Cherry Clack Hill, and the light
poured in between the tree trunks...) This is from "A Centurion of the
Thirtieth" in Puck of Pook's Hill.
2. (...The old farmhouse, weather-tiled to
the ground, took almost the colour of a blood-red ruby in the afternoon
light...) This is from "Hal o' the Draft" in Puck of Pook's Hill.
3. (...'They stole down our alley, they
tapped secretly at our door, they took off their rags, they arrayed themselves,
and they talked to my father at the wine...') This is from "The Treasure
and the Law" in Puck of Pook's Hill.
Good wishes to all, John R
