One Thing Needful I-II. [antikvár]

ONE THING NEEDFUL. CHAPTER I. "OH, MARKED FROM BIRTH, AND NURTURED FOR THE SKIES!" The gray old walls of Lashmar Castle rise in a massive pile above a broad reach of the Middle-shire Avon, which here makes a bold and sweeping curve, and dallies with its rushy banks, as if some spirit of these Lashmar woods were the Cleopatra to that watery Antony. The stream has such a languorous flow just at this point; the river here spreads itself into such a placid expanse, that one would hardly credit the current with force enough to turn a water-mill or drift a barge. It has an Arcadian air, a river made for Chloe and Phillis, and Strephon and his flock, and not for the vulgar uses of daily life. Yet