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Updated: June 28, 2025
It is a pretty place, the quarry; it is all grass-grown now, and is full of small dingles covered with hawthorns. It is a great place for tramps to camp in, and half the dingles have little grey circles in them where the camping fires have been lit. I did not mind that evidence of life, but I did not like the cast-off clothing, draggled hats, coats, skirts, and boots that lay about.
Out of the woods they passed into an open clearing, where the meadows, tenderly green and wet with dew, sloped upwards into small hillocks, sinking again into deep dingles, adorned with may-trees that were showing their white buds like little pellets of snow among the green, and where numerous clusters of blackthorn spread out lovely lavish tangles of blossom as fine as shreds of bleached wool or thread-lace upon its jet-like stems.
There were deer here browsing about the dingles, which let me come close to them and touch them, raising their heads from the grass, and regarding me with gentle and fearless eyes. Birds sang softly among the boughs, and even fluttered to my shoulder, as if pleased to be noticed.
This province is not beautiful and picturesque, like most other parts of Portugal: there are few hills and mountains, the greater part consists of heaths broken by knolls, and gloomy dingles, and forests of stunted pine; these places are infested with banditti.
But after a while the ranks began to be thinned and the ground to be broken; the little touches of beauty with which the sun had enlivened the woodland began to grow broader and cheerfuller; and then as the forest scattered away to the right and left, gay streams of light came through the glades and touched the surface of the rolling ground, where in the hollows, on the heights, on the sloping sides of the dingles, knots of trees of yet more luxuriant and picturesque growth, planted or left by the cultivator's hand long ago and trained by no hand but nature's, stood so as to distract a painter's eye; and just now, in the fresh gilding of the morning and with all the witchery of the long shadows upon the uneven ground certainly charmed Fleda's eye and mind both.
Another town is presented with a hundred islands, knolls, wooded coves, stretches of beach, and dingles, laid down as expressly for camp-life, picnics, and boating parties, beneath skies never too hot and rarely too cold. If they care to lift up their eyes from their almost subtropical gardens they can behold snowy peaks across blue bays, which must be good for the soul.
"I suppose the three of us had better go up in sackcloth, and throw ashes on our foreheads as we meet Hopkins in the garden," said Lily, "and then I know he'll heap coals of fire on our heads by sending us an early dish of peas. And Dingles would bring us in a pheasant, only that pheasants don't grow in May." "If the sackcloth doesn't take an unpleasanter shape than that, I shan't mind it."
But after a while the ranks began to be thinned and the ground to be broken; the little touches of beauty with which the sun had enlivened the woodland began to grow broader and cheerfuller; and then as the forest scattered away to the right and left, gay streams of light came through the glades and touched the surface of the rolling ground, where, in the hollows, on the heights, on the sloping sides of the dingles, knots of trees of yet more luxuriant and picturesque growth, planted or left by the cultivator's hand long ago, and trained by no hand but nature's, stood so as to distract a painter's eye; and just now, in the fresh gilding of the morning, and with all the witchery of the long shadows upon the uneven ground, certainly charmed Fleda's eye and mind both.
‘Why should I mind?’ said the man in black, ‘there are no literary men here. I have heard of literary men living in garrets, but not in dingles, whatever philologists may do; I may, therefore, speak out freely. It is only in England that literary men are invariably lickspittles; on which account, perhaps, they are so despised, even by those who benefit by their dirty services.
As for the catchpoles, leave them at liberty to hunt vermin; or send them to the world, among the dingles and brakes, to seize the debtors of the infernal crown for what devil among you will do the work better than they?" At this moment twenty devils with packs on their shoulders, like Scotchmen, mounted before the throne of Despair, and what had they got, on enquiry, but gipsies.
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