John Trevena

Heather (Classic Reprint) John Trevena

Excerpt from Heather Not that the little house talks quite that way. It is only a rough, uneducated chest of stone, and does not under stand Siste, viator! Or much of the wonderful language of epitaph-makers. The ordinary traveller will not want to stay after he has knocked off a bit of the tomb as a memento, and broken his knife in trying to record his illustrious initials upon the granite; but if he is anything better than bleached bones himself he has to; for the little house insists upon prattling, not in an eloquent way by any means, being only a primitive box of Dartmoor stone; it has no learning, and is very often at a loss for a word - its tenant had nothing to give it but his bones and sometimes it has to use quaint phrases of its own; and yet it can tell a story merely because it is a tomb and lies upon the roof; just as a little pair of boots in an almost forgotten cupboard, or a dainty garment hanging behind the door of a long unused bedroom talk most horribly, because they are not boots or garment but tongues crying like the tomb, Stay, traveller, stay! Those little boots, that dainty garment, are shrines, fellow travellers; temples of the deity to whom we have given our whole souls. We cannot pass them by without blinded eyes and a wild heart. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.