Mr Rock rose with a groan. Crossing to the open bedroom window he shone his torch out on fog. His white head was gray, and white the reflected torch light on the thick spectacles he wore. He shone it up and down. It will be a fine day, a fine day in the end, he decided.
He looked down. He clicked his light out. He found there was just enough filtering through the mist which hung eighteen foot up and which did not descend to the ground, to make out Ted, his goose, about already, a dirty pallor, almost the same colour as Alice, the Persian cat, that kept herself dry where every blade of grass bore its dark, mist laden string of water. Old and deaf, half blind, Mr Rock said about himself, the air raw in his throat. Nevertheless he saw plain how Ted was not ringed in by fog. For the goose posed staring, head to one side, with a single eye, straight past the house, up into the fog bank which had made all daylight deaf beneath, and beyond which, at some clear height, Mr Rock knew now there must be a flight of birds winging, Ted knows where, he thought.
Henry Green, Concluding. London, The Hogarth Press, 1948.
Laurie’s New and Entertaining Game of Goose, 1831.
Constant Troyon, Grazing With The Goose Girl (detail), 1854.
Jean-Francois Millet, The Goose Girl, 1863.
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