United States or Turks and Caicos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the rear of these cottages runs a narrow alley, the back street, built up at both ends, into which either a narrow roadway or a covered passage leads from one side. The cottages which face this back street command least rent, and are most neglected.
"They'd be sure to look upon me as an intruder," he muttered, "and be ready to resent my being here." At last though the silence was broken by the trampling of feet amongst the loose shingle, accompanied by a low murmured conversation, which was continued up the gap and died out finally high up towards the cottages, leaving the way for the listener clear.
First, it was the centre in prominence as a feature of the view, for with the exception of the Convent school, no one of the string of cottages and buildings, stone, brick and wood, which constitute the single street of the place, presumed to rival it even in size, but all of them disposed themselves about it, and, as it were, rested humbly in its protection, particularly the Convent school itself, a plain red-brick building, which stood by its side.
The people of property are very careful of their timber; and, rambling through a forest near Tonsberg, belonging to the Count, I have stopped to admire the appearance of some of the cottages inhabited by a woodman's family a man employed to cut down the wood necessary for the household and the estate.
"And woodbine, roses, and mignonette breathe as sweet odours as exotics, and belong of right to the cottages of England. Ah!" continued the right-minded girl, "better is a little and content therewith, than all the riches of wealth and art without it. If her ambition had even a great object I could forgive her; but all this for the littleness of society."
The time is, however, very much beguiled during this last day's sail by the sight of the land and the various objects which it presents to view the green slopes, the castle-covered hills, the cliffs, the lines of beach, with surf and breakers rolling in upon them; and sometimes, when the ship approaches nearer to the shore than usual, the pretty little cottages, covered with thatch, and adorned with gardens and shrubbery.
In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to deceive the very elect at a distance of a few thousand feet. The camouflage of concealment aims either at invisibility or imitation; I have seen a supply train look like a row of cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted up its sides.
Perhaps once long ago, when there were only the Cathedral, the Castle, the Rock, and a few cottages down by the river, when, at night-tide, strange foreign ships came up from the sea, when the woods were wild forest and the downs were bare and savage, Seatown had its romance, but that was long ago. Seatown, in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying.
Or she may have met with some passing vehicle from one of the farms on its way to the station, and may have asked the person driving to give her a seat in it. Or she may have walked as far as she can, and may have stopped to rest in some sheltered place, among the lanes to the south of this house." "I'll inquire at the cottages, uncle, while you are gone."
Even more interesting was Madame Pfeiffer's peep into the "domestic interior" of Mandarin Howqua. The house was of large size, but only one story high, with wide and splendid terraces. The windows looked into the inner courts. At the entrance were two painted images of gods to ward off evil spirits, like the horse-shoe formerly suspended to the cottages and barns of our English peasants.
Word Of The Day