Under the Thatch Author:Allen Raine General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1910 Original Publisher: Dodd, Mead and Company Subjects: History / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial acces... more »s to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV It was midnight, and the Meivon woods looked black and frowning under the driving clouds which alternately hid and disclosed the face of the moon. When £he sky was at its darkest, and slow drops of rain were beginning to fall, a girl stepped over the stile that opened from the road into the woodland path leading to Llyn Dystaw. The darkness made no difference to her, for she knew every step of the way; she had played there in childhood, had roamed there with her young companions in search of nuts or blackberries; she had often gone there also to look for the mill turkeys that loved to stray under the trees to feed on the acorns with which the ground was strewn; so that Essylt, for it was she who thus braved the threatening storm, was familiar with every glade of the forest, that is to say, on the right of the silent tarn, for towards the left, across its dark bosom the tangled growth of underwood and scrub presented no inducement to make a closer acquaintance with its surroundings. The children were daunted by its dark shadows, its legends of otters and wild cats, and their elders cared not to push their way through the brambles and thickets, when the ill-defined paths led to nothing in particular, except the further recesses of the wood. Not so the girl who was coming through the wood where we saw her walking with Michael Lloyd a week ago. As the heavy drops grew more frequent she drew her shawl over her head, but further than thattook no notice of the threatening storm. Leaving the path at the curve of the lake, she ...« less