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We walked through our village, which clings to both sides of a crack-like harbour that might just contain a carefully navigated walnut-shell. The village is grey and white, all its walls are whitewashed, all its roofs are slate with cushions of stone-crop clinging to them. Sea-thistles grow outside its doors, seagulls are its only birds.
The bishop's secretary left his carriage before a post-house of this kind, the walls of which resembled a geographical map, while the thatched roof, blooming like a flower-garden, seemed to be giving way beneath the weight of stone-crop. After begging the post-mistress to have everything in readiness for his departure in an hour's time, the abbe asked the way to the parsonage.
The crayfish in the pools would tempt him, he would try his hand at sand-eeling, or watch the surf men feed a devil-fish to the crabs. Then up the gray benches of the furrowed cliffs, starred with silver lichens and stone-crop, to where ploughmen were leaving glistening furrows in the big parsnip fields.
Who could see without emotion the linen fluttering on the hedges, the bunches of onions hanging from the eaves, the iron saucepans drying in the sun, the wooden bench overhung with honeysuckle, the stone-crop clinging to the thatch, as it does on the roofs of nearly all the cottages in France, revealing a humble life that is almost vegetative?
They came to a grizzled church, whose massive square tower rose unbroken into the darkening sky, the lower parts being illuminated by the nearest lamps sufficiently to show how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass almost as far up as the very battlements.
He was a well-trained boy, and recovered himself in an instant. "Your mail, sir," he said, laid it at my elbow, and went out. I turned to the letters with an interest the reverse of lively. The words of Henley's ballade were still running through my head "Vale-lily and periwinkle; Wet stone-crop on the sill; The look of leaves a-twinkle With windlets,"...
They came back pale and awed, begging me to come and look. I went. I tell you, boy, there were parades, caravans, pageants of goats in there all happy in the stone-crop.... I haven't dared to look for a year or more, but with a good marine-glass from the upper window of the hacienda, you can see a portion of the tract.
These plants of the rock and cliff are not so proud. They have very long and very thin roots, admirably suited to pierce the grit, and explore the cracks in the rock, to find the moisture they need. Besides this, they have fleshy leaves which help them to keep alive. The Stone-crop and the Penny-wort are well-known plants of this kind. They grow where you would least expect to find a living plant.
If he rose and continued his walk, she sat down obligingly at the window and looked at the angle of the wall where the pale flowers hung, where the Venus-hair grew from the crevices with the bindweed and the sedum, a white or yellow stone-crop very abundant in the vineyards of Saumur and at Tours.
But life, and heart, and hope were changed for ever since those bygone days! Or he would seat himself in a favourite niche of the rocks on Moel Gest, hidden by a stunted growth of the whitty, or mountain-ash, from general observation, with a rich-tinted cushion of stone-crop for his feet, and a straight precipice of rock rising just above.
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