Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!
The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admitted
to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which we
were free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled
thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries and
dark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields,
forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys of
walnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare,
wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; all
sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide
and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.
All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing, humming, whistling,
buzzing, twittering, cooing, booming, croaking, flying, creeping,
crawling, jumping, climbing, burrowing, splashing, diving things) had
been neglected for ages--an Eden where one might gather and eat of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge without fear, and learn lovingly the ways
of life without losing one's innocence; a forest that had remade for
itself a new virginity, and become primeval once more; where beautiful
Nature had reasserted her own sweet will, and massed and tangled
everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there
undisturbed for close on a hundred years, and was only waiting for the
charming Prince--or, as it turned out a few years later, alas! the
speculative builder and the railway engineer--those princes of our day.
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