Here are the quotations for this week (March 4th to 10th):
1. ... she turned her broad black bows to the westering
light, and lifted us high upon hills that we might see and rejoice with her. She
whooped into veiled hollows of elm and Sussex oak; she devoured infinite
perspectives of park palings; she surged through forgotten hamlets, whose single
streets gave back, reduplicated, the clatter of her exhaust, and, tireless, she
repeated the motions...
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 out aloud how it had once been a hall of
the Knights of the Temple.
3. ... traction-engines, their
trailers piled high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven
statute miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink
children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the wayside
rector with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up against our dust;
motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every angle; red flags of
rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed Territorials; coveys of flagrant
children playing in mid-street, and the wise, educated English dog safe and
quite silent on the pavement if his fool-mistress would but cease from trying to
save him, passed and repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings.
The sources of the last set of extracts (February 19th to 25th) are as
follows:
1. (...You'd ha' thought he'd show up in England like a fresh stiff
on snow - but you never noticed him...) This is from "A Friend of the
Family" in Debits and Credits.
2. (...he put out his long-taloned hands to a piece of plate
opposite, and fingered it lovingly…) This is from "The Man who Was" from
Life's Handicap.
3. (...Advancing cautiously to the river front, Gunga Dass stepped
from tussock to tussock until he had reached a smooth patch of sand...) This is
from "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes", in Wee Willie Winkie and other
stories.
Good wishes to all, John R
