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By Celia's arbour, by W. Besant and J. Rice
By Celia's arbour by W Besant and J Rice Author:Walter Besant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. VICTORY ROW. Mrs. Jeram was a weekly tenant in one of a row of small four-roomed houses known as Victory Row, which led out of Nelson Street, ... more »and was a broad, blind court, bounded on one side and at the end by the Dockyard wall. It was not a dirty and confined court, but quite the reverse, being large, clean, and a very Cathedral Close for quietness. The wall, built of a warm red brick, had a broad and sloping top, on which grew wallflowers, long grasses, and stonecrop ; overhanging the wall was a row of great elms, in the branches of which there was a rookery, so that all day long you could listen if you wished to the talk of the rooks. Now this is never querulous, angry, or argumentative. The rook does not combat an adversary's opinion: he merely states his own ; if the other one does not agree with himhe states it again, but without temper. If you watch them and listen, you will come to the conclusion that they are not theorists, like poor humans, but simply investigators of fact. It has a restful sound, the talk of rooks; you listen in the early morning, and they assist your sleeping half-dream without waking you ; or in the evening they carry your imagination away to woods and sweet country glades. They have cut down the elms now, and driven the rooks to find another shelter. Very likely, in their desire to sweep away everything that is pretty, they have torn the wallflowers and grasses off the wall as well. And if these are gone, no doubt Victory Row has lost its only charm. If I were to visit it now, I should probably find it squalid and mean. The eating of the tree of knowledge so often makes things that once we loved look squalid. But to childhood nothing is unlovely in which the imagination can light upon something to feed it. It is the blessed prov...« less