Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Green Alleys: A Comedy
It is a pastoral land, simple and impressive a land of old custom and old habitations. In dignity of line and colour, depending not at all on size for their distinction, the farmsteads and hamlets stand. Brick and tile have reached their finest expression upon this plain, and nowhere in England shall be found such harmony of tone wedded to form so fine.
Scattered through the land the hump-backed oasts stamp their Sign upon it and tell of the special industry that adds fame to the Kentish Weald. Everywhere their cowls ascend, here singly, here in clusters, here as appanage to the parent farmhouse. They dominate every landscape, lift their bent Shoulders in every picture and seem to plod, like broken legions of weary giants, through every league of the land.
Rivers are rare, but instead Of the streamlets familiar in other scenes, this plain is fed with in numerable ponds and waterholes, some spreading to the dignity of lakes, some reduced to mere tiny tarns, where the cattle drink at the meadow-side and the moorhen makes her nest. There is abun dance of water, for the Weald is thirsty, and must have wherewith to quench her thirst. The bright faces of the ponds ?ash everywhere - upon Open fields, at orchard edge, in little woodlands hemmed with jade of willow or green of hops; beside cot, or farm, whose whitewashed face, barred with old tim ber, is re?ected in the shining surface of the water.
Silence broods upon these plains at hot noontide, and one may walk overa mile of field path without meeting a fellow man. There are even lonely tracts where the roof-tree is not seen and Nature revels, unconscious that the greatest city in the world lies but fifty miles away.
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