Читать книгу Dick Rodney; or, The Adventures of an Eton Boy онлайн

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Close by is our old Rectory church, with its brass-mounted tombs of the Middle Ages, and its black oak pews of the Puritan times, where every Sunday and holiday the rays of light fell through the painted windows on the bowed heads of the country people while my father preached.

Beyond the house and church stretches a fair green English lawn, whereon a herd of deer are grazing, with the summer sunshine falling on their smooth dapple coats as they toss their antlers; and, when scared by the whistle of the distant railway train, they glide away to the oak coppice, that is older than the days of the Tudors or Stuarts.

That coppice and the sea-shore, but especially the latter, were my favorite resorts. Daily I wandered by the beach, listening to the surge that chafed upon the layers of pebbles, shells, and seaweed, thinking of Danish Canute and his servile courtiers, or filled by those vague, solemn, and pleasing thoughts, which the sight of an object so mighty and mysterious as the boundless ocean creates within us.