Here are the quotations for this week (June 12th to 18th):
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 mantlepiece were adorned with nymphs, scrolls, and Cupids in low relief.
The sources of last week's extracts (June 5th to 11th) are as follows:
1. ('.In the balmy dawnin' it was given out... that all orders after eight bells was to be executed in inverse ration to the cube o' the velocity....') This is from "The Bonds of Discipline" in Traffics and Discoveries.
2. ("...Get out of this and conduct your own damned manoeuvres in your own damned tinker fashion...") This is from "Their Lawful Occasions" in Traffics and Discoveries.
3. ("...D'you suppose that a man who earns his livin' by runnin' 30-knot destroyers .. is going to lie down before any blighted land-crabbin' steam-pinnace on springs ?") This is from "Steam Tactics" in Traffics and Discoveries.
Good wishes to all, John R
