The Old House
In the opening lines of The Cuckoo Clock, Mrs Molesworth paints a word-picture of a house so old that Time itself seemed to have stopped.
1877
In the opening lines of The Cuckoo Clock, Mrs Molesworth paints a word-picture of a house so old that Time itself seemed to have stopped.
1877
The Cuckoo Clock (1877), a children’s story by Mrs Mary Louisa Molesworth (published under the pen-name of Ennis Graham), tells of a little girl named Griselda who is brought to live with her two aunts. There she becomes fascinated by a cuckoo clock upon which the happiness of the timeless old house is said to depend, and which proves to be a very unusual cuckoo clock indeed.
ONCE upon a time in an old town, in an old street, there stood a very old house. Such a house as you could hardly find nowadays, however you searched, for it belonged to a gone-by time — a time now quite passed away.
It stood in a street, but yet it was not like a town house, for though the front opened right on to the pavement, the back windows looked out upon a beautiful, quaintly terraced garden, with old trees growing so thick and close together that in summer it was like living on the edge of a forest to be near them; and even in winter the web of their interlaced branches hid all clear view behind.
There was a colony of rooks in this old garden. Year after year they held their parliaments and cawed and chattered and fussed;* year after year they built their nests and hatched their eggs; year after year, I suppose, the old ones gradually died off and the young ones took their place, though, but for knowing this must be so, no one would have suspected it, for to all appearance the rooks were always the same — ever and always the same.
* ‘A parliament of rooks’ is the customary collective noun, as distinct from those for the rook’s fellow-corvids: a murder of crows, a conspiracy of ravens or a mischief of magpies. On a visit to England in 1782, young German writer Karl Philip Moritz took to watching sessions of the House of Commons with something of the anticipation of an avid theatre-goer, and his comments may shed some light on the choice of collective noun for a colony of rooks. See The Decencies of Debate.