CHAPTER III THE VALE OF BLACKMOOR
My motor cycle had carried me without a hitch from London to Melbury Abbas—then Fortune scowled on me. With ridiculous ease I had rolled along the roads all day, and I had been tempted to ride through the warm autumnal darkness till I came to the Half Moon Inn at Shaftesbury, where the roads fork away to Melbury Hill, Blandford and Salisbury. But a few hundred yards out of Melbury Abbas, and then Fortune's derisive frown. From a deceptive twist in the road I dashed into a gully, and my machine bumped and rattled and groaned like a demon caught in a trap. It performed other antics with which this chronicle has no concern, and then refused to move an inch farther.
But the song of a nightingale in a grove of elms near the road made full amends for my ill luck! It is beautiful to hear his sobbing, lulling notes when one is alone on a dark night, and Shelley was not far wrong in styling it voluptuous.
"I heard the raptured nightingale
Tell from yon elmy grove his tale
Of jealousy and love,
In thronging notes that seem'd to fall
As faultless and as musical