[Mary Anerley by R. D. Blackmore]@TWC D-Link bookMary Anerley CHAPTER XV 3/25
And the dwellers therein, who felt the edge of the difference outside their own walls, not only said but thoroughly believed that they lived in a little Goshen. For the house was well settled in a wrinkle of the hill expanding southward, and encouraging the noon.
From the windows a pleasant glimpse might be obtained of the broad and tranquil anchorage, peopled with white or black, according as the sails went up or down; for the rectory stood to the southward of the point, as the rest of Flamborough surely must have stood, if built by any other race than armadillos.
But to see all those vessels, and be sure what they were doing, the proper place was a little snug "gazebo," chosen and made by the doctor himself, near the crest of the gully he inhabited. Here upon a genial summer day--when it came, as it sometimes dared to do--was the finest little nook upon the Yorkshire coast for watching what Virgil calls "the sail-winged sea." Not that a man could see round the Head, unless his own were gifted with very crooked eyes; but without doing that (which would only have disturbed the tranquillity of his prospect) there was plenty to engage him in the peaceful spread of comparatively waveless waters.
Here might he see long vessels rolling, not with great misery, but just enough to make him feel happy in the firmness of his bench, and little jolly-boats it was more jolly to be out of, and faraway heads giving genial bobs, and sea-legs straddled in predicaments desirable rather for study than for practice.
All was highly picturesque and nice, and charming for the critic who had never got to do it. "Now, papa, you must come this very moment," cried Miss Janetta Upround, the daughter of the house, and indeed the only daughter, with a gush of excitement, rushing into the study of this deeply read divine; "there is something doing that I can not understand.
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