Down Dartmoor way Author:Eden Phillpotts 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: "A CURSE HALF SPOKE" A Lad and a lass were walking together up a steep road which rose between lofty banks with forest on either side. It was a road that in s... more »pringtime held wondrous secrets of primrose and wood-anemone and hidden nests of robins ; that in summer robed itself in trailing garment of fern below, honeysuckle and briar-roses above,.with manya ruby gem of wood-strawberry and diamond of dew twinkling in the green ; it was a road that, with autumn, brought purple mouths and stained fingers to little blackberry-gatherers, and hazelnuts for the boys—that shone adorned at such seasons with silver aigrettes of clematis, with festoons of bryony, with the bursting pods of the iris and the scarlet corals of the wild arum, set in all the glorious gleam and glow of gold-dust upon dying fern and crimson on the briar. It was a roadthat knew the music of song-birds and the murmur of springs; a road that fed and housed and kept happy a thousand brief, pleasant lives ; a road dear to the honeybee and the butterfly, to the shrew-mouse and weasel, to the lonely, nocturnal hare, limping along in moonlight when glou-- worms trim their little lamps. It was, in short, a Devonshire lane—a passing smile of Dame Nature's, no more ; and yet a trifle that can bring dim eyes to those who have known and lost. Now, in mid March, green mosses hide the rich, red earth with their delicate laces, and over them twine and fall many a curtain and fringe of bright ivy, mottled purple-brown. Sorrels raise their trefoil leaves 3lso, with here and there a white bud peeping up like a pearl and waiting for the sunbeam that shall make it laugh out into life. The lad and the lass walked full slow, and, as it chanced they belonged to a social order which hesitates not to show its love even at noon on the high...« less