Gone to Earth

Hazel looked out next morning into a cold, hostile world. The wind had gone into its winter quarters, storming down from the top of the Mountain on to the parsonage and raging i...

The chapel and minister's house at God's Little Mountain were all in one--a long, low building of grey stone surrounded by the graveyard, where stones, flat, erect, and askew, t...

Hunter's Spinney, a conical hill nearly as high as God's Little Mountain, lay between that range and Undern. It was deeply wooded; only its top was bare and caught the light red...

Undern was in its June mood. Pinks frothed over the edges of the borders, and white bush-roses flung their arms high over the porch. All was heavily fragrant, close, muffling th...

Prize-giving time came, and the younger Miss Clomber, who was to present them, tried to persuade Reddin to go up on the platform, a lorry with chairs on it. There already were M...

At six the next morning they had breakfast. Abel was busy making a hive for the next summer's swarm. When he made a coffin, he always used up the bits thus. A large coffin did n...

'He's jead at last. At the turn of the night. They came after the coffin but now. I'll be able to get them there new section crates I wanted. He's doing more for me, wanting a c...

'Why, Martha!' Edward looked at her in astonishment. It is usually the supers, and not the principals, that raise lamentation in the midst of tragedy--'why, Martha, have you los...

When Edward got home his mother was asleep in the armchair. Her whole person rose and fell like a tropical sea. Her shut eyes were like those of a statue, behind the lids of whi...

On Sunday Vessons put his resolve--to go to the Mountain and reveal Hazel's whereabouts--into practice. If he had waited, gossip would have done it for him. He set out in the af...

The garden at the Callow was full of old, sad-coloured flowers that had lost all names but the country ones. Chief among them, by reason of its hardihood, was a small plant call...

Hazel ran home through the dew, swift as a hare to her form. Mrs. Marston, communing with a small wood fire and a large Bible, looked over her spectacles as Hazel came in, and s...

'Yes. They've been to shows year by year, and very well they've stood it. I only hope the constant travelling won't set up fermentation. I should like those Morellas to outlive...

On Sunday evening, as usual, the little bell began to sound plaintively in the soft air which was like a pale wild-rose. Mrs. Marston had betaken herself out of her own door int...

Outwardly there was little change in the bearings of the two women; it was only in feminine pinpricks and things implied that Mrs. Marston showed her anger and Hazel her dislike...

It was the night of the great storm. Undern rattled and groaned; its fireless chimneys roared, and doors in unused passages banged so often that the house took on an air of bein...

It was the Friday after Hazel's coming, and Reddin was away, much against his will, at a horse fair. He was quite surprised at the hurt it gave him to be away from Hazel. So far...

On Lord's Day more than on any other at the mountain Hazel was like a small derelict boat beached on a peaceful shore. There was a hypnotic quiet about the place, with no sound...

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky--shepherdless, futile, imponderable--and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their...

Hazel sat on a large flat gravestone with Foxy beside her. They were like a sculpture in marble on some ancient tomb. Coming, so soon after her strange moment of terror in the q...

Morning by morning Hazel watched the fuchsia bushes, set with small red flowers, purple-cupped, with crimson stamens, sway in beautiful abandon. The great black bees pulled at t...

She crept out of the house, still as death, except for Mrs. Marston's soft yet all-pervading snores. Out in the graveyard, where as yet no bird sang, it was as if the dead had a...

They went gallantly, if slowly, on through narrow ways, lit on either side by the breath-taking freshness of new hawthorn leaves. Primroses, wet and tall, crisply pink of stalk...

All the colours were so bright that they were grotesque and startling. Above the violently green fields the sky shone like blue glass, and across the east were two long vermilio...

Edward, coming downstairs, felt such a rush of joy and youth at sight of her that he was obliged to stand still and remember that joy and youth were not for him, that his only l...

In the early morning of Midsummer Eve, Hazel wandered up the hill-slopes. There the sheep, golden, and gospel-like in the early light, fed on wet lawns pale and unsubstantial as...

At the parsonage everything was ready early. Edward, restless after his rough awakening, had risen at three and finished his own preparations, being ready to help Mrs. Marston w...

Next morning Vessons went off in high feather; Hazel was so safely disposed of. Reddin left at the same time, and all the long May day Undern was deserted, and lay still and sil...

'She 'as, God's truth! But you'll find it forra I make no doubt, sir. "There's a way"' (he looked ironically at the poultry-basket behind the trap, from which peered anxious, be...

All the windows were dark in Alderslea, except one faint dormer where an old woman was dying. They began to climb the lane that led up to the Mountain. Cattle looked over hedges...

The stately May morning, caparisoned in diamonds, full of the solemnity that perfect beauty wears, had come out of the purple mist and shamed the hovel where Hazel dressed for h...

Undern Hall, with its many small-paned windows, faced the north sullenly. It was a place of which the influence and magic were not good. Even in May, when the lilacs frothed int...

Hazel was picking wimberry-flowers from their stalks. She sucked out the drop of honey from each flower like a bee. The blossoms were like small, rose-coloured tulips upside dow...

Next day Hazel did not go into the woods. In the evening, sitting in the quiet parlour while Edward read aloud and Mrs. Marston knitted, she felt afraid as she remembered it. Ye...

'Sitting at the supper in a grand shining gown wi' roses on it,' said Hazel ecstatically, her voice rising to a kind of chant, 'with a white cloth on table like school-treat, an...

Early next morning, while the finch still dreamed its heavy dream and the mice were still motionless balls, Hazel was awakened by a knock at the massive oak door. She ran across...