There it lay, a weather-beaten
sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway,
trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern
communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no "business
block"; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state
of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been
bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on
the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always been told that she ought
to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North Dormer.
She knew that, compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer
represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization. Everyone
in the village had told her so ever since she had been brought there as
a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to her, on a terrible occasion
in her life: "My child, you must never cease to remember that it was Mr.
Royall who brought you down from the Mountain."
She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from the scarred cliff
that lifted its sullen wall above the lesser slopes of Eagle Range,
making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley.
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