The Dwarf's Chamber and Other Stories

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ADVENTURES ARE TO THE ADVENTUROUS ON leaving that hospitable inn, it was Warwick's intention to push on towards London; but so stimulated was his curiosity by the landlady's chatter about the Le- lanro family, that he determined to look again on that tantalizing wall, which apparently concealed some strange secret. With this intent he retraced his way across the bridge, still drawing onward by his fiddling the dancing children, and strolled over the meadows in the direction of the Manor. Here, anxious to rid himself of his innocent company, he sat down under a tree, and played to their restless feet until they were fairly wearied out. Then he nodded a kind farewell, and leaving them to pick buttercups till the school-bell rang, he betook himself along the banks of the stream. This rustic river, of no great width, parted two landscapes markedly dissimilar in character. On the further side a forest of oak, and sycamore, and ash, and birch covered a round swelling hill; and at its foot, numerous large rocks thrust themselves from amid the green foliage into the turbid waters. Overshore the stream fretted and whitened round the Titanic stones, but swept smoothly onward, deep and silent, under the shadow of the bank whereon Warwick stood. Thence spread fat meadow lands dotted with ancient trees, and divided by flowering hedgerows, the rigid intersecting lines of which assimilated the plain to a chess-board. Through this fertility the highroad meandered white and dusty to where the vision was stayed by low-lying hills undulating against the blue June sky. As a finishing touch to the contrast, the peaked roofs of the Manor House showed themselves in the dip of the land, between forest slope and low-lying meadow, linking, as it were, the mountain with the vale, past sa..