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Updated: June 2, 2025
Abb's Head and the village of Eyemouth, looked out on the lonely and boisterous German Ocean. A black domain of wild pasture-land surrounded their new residence, and formed the remains of their property. Lord Ravenswood, the heir of this ruined family, was far from bending his mind to his new condition of life.
He had woodland and pasture-land, cattle and horses, like Job, and in his house, health, peace, and children: dark-eyed Dorcas and Jemima, white-headed Obed and Zephaniah, and the twins that now clambered over his shoulder and stood on his broad, strong palms, two others, Philip and Henry, had died in the cradle. Dorcas the younger stood in the doorway, and leaned gracefully towards her father.
There they closed ranks, with their arms recklessly around whoever was nearest, and made a thorough tour of the bit of pasture-land. For some moments they leaned upon the dividing fence and gazed admiringly into the rich orchard and vineyard of the Avery estate. But soon they were skipping back to the parsonage again, and the kitchen door banged behind them.
The church was his, especially his, since he had restored it entirely at his own expense, the rectory, a lop- sided, half-timbered house, built in the fifteenth century, was his, the garden, full of flowering shrubs, carelessly planted and allowed to flourish at their own wild will, was his, the ten acres of pasture-land that spread in green luxuriance round and about his dwelling were his, and, best of all, the orchard, containing some five acres planted with the choicest apples, cherries, plums and pears, and bearing against its long, high southern wall the finest peaches and nectarines in the county, was his also.
The valley is a deep winding glen cut out by the Hodeni between the great cliffs of the Black Mountains on the one side and the ranges around the Sugar Loaf on the other. In places the cliffs are precipitous, but, generally, the lower slopes furnish pasture-land and occasional woods, while the upper parts are covered with bracken fern, with a few trees and copses.
The cellar of the old house is now a part of the pasture-land, and its form can be traced by the simple swelling of the turf.
The dank hedges and sodden fields had a melancholy aspect, which seemed to affect a couple of horsemen who were walking their jaded, much-splashed horses along a narrow road, or rather lane, which led between a stretch of pasture-land on one side and a ploughed field on the other. The red coats and top-boots of both were liberally besprinkled with mud; even their hats had not quite escaped.
Behind the column which still commemorates "the great battle" of that day, stretches now a trilateral patch of pasture-land, which faces a small house.
On its other side, encompassed by a level belt of pasture-land and corn-fields, the white little town of Inverary glittered like a gem on the sea-shore, while to the right, amid lawns and gardens, and gleaming banks of wood, that hung down into the water, rose the dark towers of the Castle, the whole environed by an amphitheatre of tumbled porphyry hills, beyond whose fir-crowned crags rose the bare blue mountain-tops of Lorn.
Single hollyhocks of a few colours followed the fence line; tall phlox of two colours, white and a dreary dull purple, rambled into the grass and was scattered through the orchard, in company with New England asters and various golden rods that had crept up from the waste pasture-land below; and a straggling line of button chrysanthemums, yellow, white, maroon, and a sort of medicinal rhubarb-pink, had backed up against the woodhouse as if seeking shelter.
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