Excerpt from The Mirror in the Dusk The children came adventurously across the old broken fences into the wild, weedy orchard of the crab trees. It was a way more in keeping with the desertion and desolation of the orchard to come like this rather than up the grass-grown boreen and through all the wooden gates with their lichened, half-rotten bars. At the last fence they paused, and their bare legs gleamed whitely against the rank profusion of the untended hedge. It was saturday morning, and the day ln itself stood for release from school and the freedom of the fields Their young, bright minds were filled with gladness, and amid all the wild wonder of the grassy spaces there was no place at all that held the same lure as the crab-tree orchard. It was a place that never seemed lonely like the low lakes of the valley or the hills all splashed with golden furze up which one climbed into the rich, windy fields. It never seemed to hold to itself any life of pain making a pang of separation to flow into their hearts when the evening fell. There was something lovely that seemed to linger about it always hiding affectionately what life or death it held from all mean, sad things. No beautiful place out of a fairy story had ever been contrived by telling to their minds, and so the eyes of all their longing reached out to this place. And the crabs were not a bit like other crabs. They were sweet, sweet nearly as apples and, besides, they were forbidden fruit, and without a single trace of sourness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.