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The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy
page 5 of 244 (02%)
singular peninsula once an island, and still called such, that
stretches out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is
connected with the mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles 'cast up by
rages of the se,' and unparalleled in its kind in Europe.

The pedestrian was what he looked like--a young man from London and the
cities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanism
sat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with
something of self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months
had flown since he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely
rock of his birthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid
many contrasting societies, peoples, manners, and scenes.

What had seemed usual in the isle when he lived there always looked
quaint and odd after his later impressions. More than ever the spot
seemed what it was said once to have been, the ancient Vindilia Island,
and the Home of the Slingers. The towering rock, the houses above
houses, one man's doorstep rising behind his neighbour's chimney, the
gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing on
apparently almost vertical planes, the unity of the whole island as a
solid and single block of limestone four miles long, were no longer
familiar and commonplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly unique and
white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitely
stratified walls of oolite,

The melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles, . . .

with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any
spectacle he had beheld afar.
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