Granite Author:Ernest George Henham 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 II ABOUT THE ROAD The main road was magnificent, straight, struck into the heart of the country like a great sword. Seen at a distance it waved gra... more »ndly. It was so arrogant in its right of way, and the things crawling along it were small and black against its dusty whiteness. Those things that looked like insects from the height of the moor, those things which crawled the hill so slowly, were roadmakers. Wonderful little black things on two rather crooked legs who had built up that terrace-like road winding above Fursdon as if it led into another world. Fursdon was proud of two things, its road and its mine. It took pride also in its beer-houses, not because they were remarkably good ones, but because it had such a lot of them. This village had a reputation for drunkenness to maintain, and opportunities were ample. When a miner lurched out of the door of the Queen's Arms he was bound to stumble over the threshold of the White Hart. If the landlord of the Black Lion roared his refusal to give trust there were other Lions, Red and Golden, ready to purr the rejected into their dens. Fursdon was not a poor place, on account of the mine which employed a great deal of labour, and yet every man seemed poor. Most of the inhabitants owned their cottages, but the interiors were generally wretched, the buildings were going rotten—the hedges and ditches were littered with broken bottles. The mine, which was a breeder of beer-houses, always thundered away gently, and round it curved the road, silentand indifferent, glittering with specks of mica, for granite had gone to the making of it, in the sunshine, black sometimes in winter, but not always, for the rain washed brown peat from one side and red clay from the other. The road was there always, and yet it was only there tha...« less