The Book of Gilly
by Emily Lawless (9780217066174)

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 III TELLS OF SOME NEW EXPERIENCES AND A NEW FRIEND OLD Mr. Moriarty?nobody on or near Inishbeg ever spoke of him without the prefix?was a man of a type which some people are inclined to wish that Ireland would continue to produce a little more abundantly. Past sixty now, and a good deal stooped, with kindly blue eyes, and hair as white as the syringa just then coming into bloom, he was, for a southern Irishman, rather taciturn than otherwise, a circumstance which may explain how it came about that, mild as he was, his own family stood in decided awe of him. When his late mistress, Lady Shannagh, first took possession of Inishbeg, it had been indistinguishable from any of the other boulder-covered and gorse-grown islands which stud those bays. Now it had become what, in the helplessness of language, we are apt to call " a dream," and even the comparative neglect that had fallen upon it during the last ten years had served only to mellow what at first may have suggested too palpably the touch of artifice. Every plant which will grow in that soft salt-laden air? and for the length of that list the reader is referred to the experts?was to be discovered growing in some corner or other of it. An imaginative person might even have said that the entire island itself had become one largeflower. From the group of oaks and arbutus upon its summit, down to the mesembryanthemums which tossed their crimson curtains almost to sea-level, the whole spot wore an aspect of surprising finish, the unlaboured finish of a nautilus or a cowry. Of the original elements there were only the sea itself, and the wind?in summer time the latter often carried petals of the island flowers right across to the mainland?likewise the rocks with their rock- pools, the heather, the broom, and the gorse b...

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