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Horses were again brought for inspection, and there was a repetition of previous horrors. At last a man came from Mossgrown. He had an honest face; he knew of a man who knew of a man whose brother had just <i>the</i> horse for me, "sound, stylish, kind, gentle as a lamb, fast as the wind." Profiting by experience, I said I would look at it.
The poor little rotten roof, mossgrown as it was, did not burn as rapidly as Peter could have wished, but by dint of much coaxing and a plentiful sprinkling of paraffin, the fire at last gained ground, and a dense smoke began to issue from the smouldering thatch.
How well she remembered the neglected air of the place when last she had seen it the mossgrown walks, the duckweed in the moat, the straggling rose-bushes, everything out of order, from the broken weathercock on one of the gateway towers, to the scraper by the half-glass door in one corner of the quadrangle, which had been, used instead of the chief entrance!
It is the grave, marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and another at the foot, the grave of two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis buried them.
There are mountains beyond mountains lying against the sky, heather clad or mossgrown; there are small lakes lying at the foot of mountains or between mountains; there are dreary expanses of bog stretching for miles on each side of the road between us and the mountains, and rising out of the bog are wee bits of fields and most horrible habitations.
And now I begin to feel and perhaps should have sooner felt that we have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be, will vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many pages about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its walls, and on the river, and in the woods, and the influences that wrought upon him from all these sources.
Fresh seed has been sown, and 'rattles' and similar plants destructive to the hay crop have been carefully eradicated. New gales, new carts, and traps, all exhibit the same movement. The cowyards in many districts were formerly in a very dilapidated condition. The thatch of the sheds was all worn away, mossgrown, and bored by the sparrows.
On the other side the lane, seen between gaps in the old oaks and chestnuts that hung over the mossgrown pales of Hazeldean Park, rose gentle, verdant slopes, dotted with sheep and herds of deer.
In the garden three or four aged and mossgrown apple-trees stood among the little plots of potatoes, and as many plum-trees in the elder hedge. One tall pear-tree with scored bark grew near the end of the cottage; it bore a large crop of pears, which were often admired by the people who came along the road, but were really hard and woody.
"Surely, Oh Francis," he said, "I can be satisfied with the mossgrown bark which has grown tender beneath the caress of the snows and which wintry dawns have made fragrant.
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