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Malbone: An Oldport Romance | Thomas Wentworth Higginson | |
VI. "Some Lover's Clear Day" |
Page 3 of 6 |
Within, the tower is full of debris, now disintegrated into one solid mass, and covered with vegetation. You can lie on the blossoming clover, where the bees hum and the crickets chirp around you, and can look through the arch which frames its own fair picture. In the foreground lies the steep slope overgrown with bayberry and gay with thistle blooms; then the little winding cove with its bordering cliffs; and the rough pastures with their grazing sheep beyond. Or, ascending the parapet, you can look across the bay to the men making hay picturesquely on far-off lawns, or to the cannon on the outer works of Fort Adams, looking like vast black insects that have crawled forth to die. Here our young people spent the day; some sketched, some played croquet, some bathed in rocky inlets where the kingfisher screamed above them, some rowed to little craggy isles for wild roses, some fished, and then were taught by the boatmen to cook their fish in novel island ways. The morning grew more and more cloudless, and then in the afternoon a fog came and went again, marching by with its white armies, soon met and annihilated by a rainbow. The conversation that day was very gay and incoherent,--little fragments of all manner of things; science, sentiment, everything: "Like a distracted dictionary," Kate said. At last this lively maiden got Philip away from the rest, and began to cross-question him. "Tell me," she said, "about Emilia's Swiss lover. She shuddered when she spoke of him. Was he so very bad?" "Not at all," was the answer. "You had false impressions of him. He was a handsome, manly fellow, a little over-sentimental. He had travelled, and had been a merchant's clerk in Paris and London. Then he came back, and became a boatman on the lake, some said, for love of her." |
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Malbone: An Oldport Romance Thomas Wentworth Higginson |
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