Clovernook Author:Alice Cary 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: THE STRANGE LADY. In a quiet little valley, scooped among the river hills, where there was always a murmur and always mist, creeping over the turf, and reachi... more »ng softly from bough to bough, sometimes dark ened with shadows, and sometimes streaky with sunlight, stands a desolate and ruinous cabin, where once dwelt a person, called by her neighbors, the strange lady; by herself, Mrs. Clifford. All the summer the grass in this pretty scene was nearly covered with flowers—king-cups, and red anemonees, and pale daisies— while the hedge of sassafras, that ran up the slopes, shook with the melody of a thousand birds, especially when the rosy twilight of morning faded into the clear light of day. A little way from the cabin door, by a wall of gray stone, where the morning-glory hung blue-bells in the sunshine and the wild rose climbed and blossomed, a spring of bright clear water washed over its mossy rim, and rippled like a skein of silver down until it lost itself in deeper and darker waves. The valley seems less beautitul now; for though nature is lovely always, humanity gives it a deeper charm, lost, fallen, and ruined as it is. There is a moaning and a wailing in the deep bosom of the earth, that were not there when the wings of the angels cleft open the golden clouds which hung between the lower and the upper heaven, ere, with but the ruins of immortality, the sinful ones went out from Paradise, waking, with their slightest footsteps, the awful echoes of the grave. Sin, sin! the world because of thee is darkened from her early glory, and in all her beautiful borders there are hearts that can only lay their great burdens aside on the starry threshold of eternity. Whether the shadow of previous transgression, I know not, but very evidently some mystery hung over the hist...« less