Shining Ferry

f had once been the chief seat. The house? a grey stone building with two wings and a heavy porch midway between them?dated from 1592, and had received its shape of a capital E in compliment to Queen Elizabeth. King Charles himself had lodged in it for a day during the Civil War, and while inspecting the guns on a terraced walk above the harbour, had narrowly escaped a shot fired across from the town where Essex's troops lay in force. The shot killed a poor fisherman beside him, and His Majesty that afternoon gave thanks for his own preservation in the private chapel of Hall. In those days, the porch and all the main windows looked seaward upon this chapel across half an acre ofgreensward; but the Rosewarnes had since converted the lawn into a farmyard and the shrine into a cow- byre. Above it ran a line of tall elms screening a lane used by the farm-carts, and above this again a great field of arable rounded itself against the sky. From the top of Parc-an-hal?so the field was named?the eye travelled over a goodly prospect: sea and harbour; wide stretches of cultivated land, intersected by sunken woodlands which marked the winding creeks of the river; other woodlands yet more distant, embowering the great mansion of Damelioc; the purple rise of a down capped by a monument commemorating ancient battles. The scene held old and deeply written meanings for Rosewarne, as he gazed over it in the descending twilight?meanings he had spent his life to acquire, and ot... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.