Land's End

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: WHITE HORSE WINTER THE little house where I was born, and in which I passed the earlier years of my life, stands about a hundred yards back from the beach and a little more than a mile down-shore from Old Harbor. What we always knew as the Creek runs in there, with plenty of water even at low tide to float...
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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: WHITE HORSE WINTER THE little house where I was born, and in which I passed the earlier years of my life, stands about a hundred yards back from the beach and a little more than a mile down-shore from Old Harbor. What we always knew as the Creek runs in there, with plenty of water even at low tide to float my father's dory; and the flawless yellow face of a dune used to stand up behind the house, sheltering us from the norther- lies that pick the scud from the ocean, a mile back across the Neck, and spatter it in the bay at our front door. My father and mother still live in the house, but the dune has shifted to the westward and it is colder there on a winter night. My older sister was born before my father and mother came from the Western Islands, so she had a recollection of green country; but we younger children knew nothing but the water and the sand. Strangely enough, my most vivid remembrance of the water is not from any of its wilder moods. I picture it with the tide out at evening, reflecting the face of the western sky, flat, garish-colored, silent, with a spur of mutefire reaching out at me along the surface of the Creek. The dunes were the magic land, full of shifting shadows, and deceptive, where a little covey of beach-plums made themselves out as a far-away and impenetrable forest, especially when the mist came inland, and a footprint in the sand across a hollow appeared a vast convulsion of nature at the other end of a day's journey. And one felt the dunes always moving, rising up out of the sea, marching silently across the Neck, and advancing upon the little house. I can remember the spring when the sand ate up a pear-tree my father had brought from the Islands. The dunes entered our lives and became a part of them. Even now the sight of a strip of s...