lien Corn_

Bochyn was built to escape as easily as possible the many storms of the
desolate country that surrounded it. The windows in the front of the
house looked out between two groves of straight Cornish elms over a
moist valley to a range of low hills, whose checkered green and brown
surface in the perpetual changes of light and atmosphere took on the
variety and translucence of water or precious stones; and not merely
their peripheral tints, but even their very contours seemed during the
courses of the sun and moon hourly to shift. Behind the house was the
town-place, a squelchy courtyard hemmed in by stables and full of casual
domestic animals. From here a muddy lane led up to the fields on the
slopes above, slopes considerably more lofty than those visible from the
front windows and ending in a bleak plateau of heather and gorse that
formed the immediate approach to the high black cliffs of many miles of
coast. The house itself was a long two-storied building, flanked by low
gray stone hedges feathered with tamarisks and fuchsias. The garden,
owing principally to the care of Granfa Champion, had an unusual number
of flowers. Even now in November the dahlias were not over, and against
the walls of the house pink, ivy-leaved geraniums and China roses were
in full bloom. The garden itself ended indeterminately, with no
perceptible line of severance, in the moors or watery meads always
vividly colored, and in summer creaming with meadow-sweet. At the bottom
of the garden was a rustic gazebo, from which it was possible to follow
the course of the stream up the valley between cultivated slopes that
gave way to stretches of gorse and bracken, until the valley swept round
out of sight in thick coverts of dwarfed oaks. Westward in the other
direction the stream, flowing straighter and straighter as it neared the
sea, lost itself in a brown waste of sand, while the range whose
undulations it had followed sank abruptly to a marsh. This flatness made
the contrary slope, which jutted forward so as to hide the actual
breaking of the waves, appear portentously high. Indeed, the cliffs on
that side soon reached three hundred feet and on account of their sudden
elevation looked much higher. The stream spread out in wide shallows to
its outlet, trickling somewhat ineffectively in watery furrows through
the sand.

On the farther side of the brown waste, where not even rushes would
grow, so complete and perpetual was the devast