Читать книгу Knock at a Venture онлайн

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At the junction of two roads, that cross at right angles within a hundred yards of the moor-gate, there stands a blackthorn of venerable shape. It is a deformed, grotesque tree, much bent and shrivelled. Its boughs are coated with close fabric of grey encrustations, but such clothing has failed to protect its carcase against a century of winters and biting winds. In autumn the scanty foliage is still brightened by a meagre crop of fruit; but life crawls with difficulty up the zigzag bones of this most ancient thorn, while each spring its tardy sap awakes less of the tree, and leaves increasing concourse of abrupt and withered twigs to rot above and below the centre of vitality. Beneath this ruin you shall note a slight hillock of green grass, where foxgloves shake aloft their purple pyramids of blossom and a rabbit’s hole lies close beside them. Of artificial barrow or modern burying-place there is no suggestion here; and yet this mound by the highway side conceals a grave; and the story of the human dust within it is the truth concerning one who lived and smarted more than a hundred years ago. Men were of the same pattern then as now, but manners varied vastly; and the Moor-man, who farms upon the grudging boundaries of that great central desert to-day, and curses the winds that scatter his beggarly newtakes with thistledown and fern seed, might wonder at the tales this same wild wind could tell him of past times and of the customs of his ancestors.