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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Untitled Article
bad been digged—Law ! law ! lawl The right was clearly hers , she gained the victory , and it is superfluous to tell the reader what became of the acres . She preyed on the loss—on such food , how could she live ? but she was not a creature of sadness , she used to laugh , and laugh well , and such a laugh ! so clear and keen—no , not keen , that is sharp-edgy : you could not hear a jar upon her
laugh so harsh as a gossamer thread . It was a succession of beads of sound leaping up from her larynx ; diminishing , and diminishing , and diminishing ( these words are too long ) to an invisible point , and all , to the perceptible last , so clear ! you have heard a smooth pebble as it danced along the glaze ice ? I never heard such a laugh but once since . A few week ' s ago , I was walking in Piccadilly at one
0 clock in the morning , that is to say , in the west-end vocabulary , evening ; to prevent mistakes , I mean it was one hour past midnight . 1 heard such a laugh ( on the opposite side of the way , note ye ) from one of the merry miserables who parade London streets at that hour , perhaps shelterless . It was my mother ' s laugh ! and she had been dead thirty-five years . She died young *—in her youth .
I was born within some hundred yards of the termination of a wooded hill , the slope of which abruptly closed in the precipitous banks of a rug ' ged and roaring stream , well characterised by its name , which , in the language of the country , is Stone , or Rock-breaker . Perhaps I imbibed the froth and impetuosity of my character from a sympathy with that stream . There stood , and yet stands—but oh , how changed!—a little white-washed cottage , trelliced with
honeysuckles and roses ; the perfume from which , even across this gulf of time and distance , I can inhale in imagination . A small garden , the ground of which was stolen from the domains of the woody hill , looked laughingly down on the cottage * and was circumscribed by a wall of rough , unhewn fragments from the . neighbouring rocks . This wall was my father ' s handywork ; for a gate , a gap had been left in the building , which was reached by ascending three larger fragments
embedded—mud , I suppose , was the cement used—in the lower part of the wall , —three jutting stones . I remember , well , what an achievement it was considered for me to climb up them , while my father stood by encouraging the little cragsman . To meet the calls of necessity , not for ornament nor for recreation , did my poor father till that garden . Cabbages , of course , were more abundant than carnations . Leeks , 111 warrant , were there ; and I remember the only things I cared about ,
were the borders of doubLe daisies . Single or double I always loved them ; better , though , the little wild thing that lifts up its beautiful face in the fields and asks a kiss from your feet . I never could crush them by treading on them . In front of the cottage was a smooth patch of green sward , preserving the form in which nature had laid it there : it was not snipped and scissored , and squared or rounded , nor
hemmed with a border of gravel . At a short distance from the house , in a valley between our hill and the next to it , was a broad sheet of water , gathered , by some artificial process into which I never inquired , from Stone-breaker ' s territories . This was used for working a 4 forge / from the wheels of which it threw itself down into the channel of the aforesaid Stone-breaker ; returning , as it were , the borrowed water , which here was crossed by a venerable looking greyatone
Untitled Article
Autobiography of Pel . Verjuice . 7 327
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 327, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/39/
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