The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other PapersStevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 22: Juvenilia and Other Papers
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a
man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres of
stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and
white roads, was like going three whole days' journey to the southward,
or a month back into the summer.
I was sorry to leave "Peacock Farm"--for so the place is called, after
the name of its splendid pensioners--and go forward again in the quiet
woods. It began to grow both damp and dusk under the beeches: and as the
day declined the colour faded out of the foliage: and shadow, without
form and void, took the place of all the fine tracery of leaves and
delicate gradations of living green that had before accompanied my walk.
I had been sorry to leave "Peacock Farm," but I was not sorry to find
myself once more in the open road, under a pale and somewhat
troubled-looking evening sky, and put my best foot foremost for the inn
at Wendover.
Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street should
go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen with a new
idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of neighbours to join in
his heresy. It would have somewhat the look of an abortive
watering-place, such as we may now see them here and there along the
coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some of
them, and the look of long habitation, of a life that is settled and
rooted, and makes it worth while to train flowers about the windows, and
otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant. The
church, which might perhaps have served as rallying-point for these
loose houses, and pulled the township into something like intelligible
unity, stands some distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take
the public buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to
be the principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay windows, and
three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the eaves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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