The gap in the park hedge, indeed! The park hedge had disappeared, the
very park itself was gone, cut up, demolished, all parcelled out into
small gardens, with trim white villas, except where a railway ran
through a deep cutting in the chalk. A train actually roared and panted
by, and choked me with its filthy steam as I looked round in
stupefaction on the ruins of my long-cherished hope.
If that train had run over me and I had survived it, it could not have
given me a greater shock; it all seemed too cruel and brutal an outrage.
A winding carriage-road had been pierced through the very heart of the
wilderness; and on this, neatly-paled little brand-new gardens abutted,
and in these I would recognize, here and there, an old friend in the
shape of some well-remembered tree that I had often climbed as a boy,
and which had been left standing out of so many, but so changed by the
loss of its old surroundings that it had a tame, caged, transplanted
look--almost apologetic, and as if ashamed of being found out at last!
Nothing else remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and
chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I
lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of
blankness and bereavement.
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