The house was built on the more sloping side of a high
hollow just within the moor, which stretched wide away from the very edge
of the farm. If you climbed the slope, following a certain rough country
road, at the top of it you saw on the one side the farm, in all the
colours and shades of its outspread, well tilled fields; on the other
side, the heath. If you went another way, through the garden, through the
belt of shrubs and pines that encircled it, and through the wilderness
behind that, you were at once upon the heath. If then you went as far as
the highest point in sight, wading through the heather, among the rocks
and great stones which in childhood I never doubted grew also, you saw
before you nothing but a wide, wild level, whose horizon was here and
there broken by low hills. But the seeming level was far from flat or
smooth, as I found on the day of the adventure I am about to relate. I
wonder I had never lost myself before. I suppose then first my legs were
able to wander beyond the ground with which my eyes were familiar.
It had rained all the morning and afternoon. When our last lesson was
over, my uncle went out, and I betook myself to the barn, where I amused
myself in the straw. By this time Rover must have gone back to his maker,
for I remember as with me a large, respectable dog of the old-fashioned
mastiff-type, who endured me with a patience that amounted almost to
friendliness, but never followed me about.
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