Down to her seventieth year she had never found it
absurd to beseech God to make her "a good girl"; nor did she find it
so as the Workhouse gate opened, and she began a new life.
CUCKOO VALLEY RAILWAY
This century was still young and ardent when ruin fell upon Cuckoo
Valley. Its head rested on the slope of a high and sombre moorland,
scattered with granite and china-clay; and by the small town of
Ponteglos, where it widened out into arable and grey pasture-land, the
Cuckoo river grew deep enough to float up vessels of small tonnage
from the coast at the spring tides. I have seen there the boom of
a trading schooner brush the grasses on the river-bank as she came
before a southerly wind, and the haymakers stop and almost crick their
necks staring up at her top-sails. But between the moors and Ponteglos
the valley wound for fourteen miles or so between secular woods, so
steeply converging that for the most part no more room was left at the
bottom of the V than the river itself filled. The fisherman beside it
trampled on pimpernels, sundew, watermint, and asphodels, or pushed
between clumps of _Osmunda regalis_ that overtopped him by a couple of
feet.
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