Tale the Seventh.
A SKETCH IN UMBER.
A SKETCH IN UMBER.
Every life has its history: this is the story of Ruth Welch, the placid-faced, silver-haired woman who sat in the September twilight looking out over the moorlands one Saturday evening, and considering many things.
The house faced toward the south. It looked across a little creek which made in from the sea, and it had in its prospect only level heaths to the horizon’s edge. On the west stretched the waters of an arm of the Atlantic, and the tides came twice a day around the low cape into the inlet, and the wind blew over the moors; but in all directions one looked upon level wastes,—“the plains,” the country people called them, speaking of them sometimes as “Welch’s bogs,” or in sections as the “blueb’ry plains,” or the “cramb’ry marshes;” and people who lived outside of them regarded the moors as painfully dull.