turf-slane

Updated: May 6, 2025

In the gray of the summer evening, as the sunset faded and the twilight gathered, spreading itself tenderly over the pastures and corn-fields, over the purple-green glooms of the fir forest over the open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the cottager and squatter over the clear brown streams that trickle out of the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and vigour as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village street and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and glossy foliage of the self-sown hollies spring up between the roots of the beech trees, where plovers cry, and stoat and weazel lurk and scamper, while the old poacher's lean, ill-favoured, rusty-coloured lurcher picks up a shrieking hare, and where wandering bands of gypsies those lithe, onyx-eyed children of the magic East still pitch their dirty, little, fungus-like tents around the camp-fire, as the sunset died and the twilight thus softly widened and deepened, Lady Calmady found herself, for the first time during all the long summer day, alone.

Lucas Malet - The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance