Hyacinth got up early – an operation attended with very little effort, as he had scarcely closed his eyes all night. What he saw from his window made him dress as rapidly as a young man could do who desired more than ever that his appearance should not give strange ideas about him: an old garden, with parterres in curious figures, and little intervals¹ of lawn which appeared to our hero’s cockney vision fantastically green. At one end of the garden was a parapet of mossy brick, which looked down on the other side into a canal, or moat, or quaint² old pond; and from the same standpoint there was also a view of a considerable part of the main body of the house (Hyacinth’s room appeared to be in a wing commanding the extensive, irregular back), which was richly gray wherever it was not green with ivy³ and other dense⁴ creepers, and everywhere infinitely⁵ like a picture, with a high-piled, ancient, russet roof, broken by huge chimneys and queer peep-holes and all manner of odd gables and windows on different lines and antique patches and protrusions, and a particularly fascinating architectural excrescence in which a wonderful clock-face was lodged⁶ – a clock-face covered with gilding⁷ and blazonry but showing many traces of the years and the weather. Hyacinth had never in his life been in the country – the real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere⁸ ravelled fringe of London – and there entered through his open casement⁹ the breath of a world enchantingly new and, after his recent feverish¹⁰ hours, inexpressibly

分享到：