Martin Pippen in the Apple Orchard

Another quote by Eleanor Farjeon...from Martin Pippen in the Apple Orchard (1921)...with slight line rearrangement...Some background...a small girl lives in a gaunt and gloomy mill-house with her harsh father...who never lets her out...has her do most the work...and a boy three years older knocks on the mill door asking her for bread...she gives him seven ears of wheat 'heavy with grain, and bowed on their ripe stem.'

Then he felt in his pocket
and after some fumbling got hold of what he wanted and pulled it out.
'Here you are child,' he said, 'and thank you again'
He put his present into her hand and swung off whistling.
He turned once to wave at her,
and the corn in his cap nodded with its weight and his light gait.
She stood gazing till he was out of sight,
and then she looked at what he had given her.
It was a shell.
She had heard of shells, of course, but she had never seen one.
Yet she knew this was no English shell.
It was as large as the top of a teacup, but more oval than round.
Over its surface, like pearl, rippled waves of sea-green and sea-blue,
under a lustre that was like golden moonlight on the ocean.
She could not define or trace the waves of colour;
they flowed in and out of each other with interchangeable movement.
One half of the outer rim,
which was transparently thin and curled like the fantastic edge of a surf wave,
was speckled with a faint play of rose and cream and silver,
that melted imperceptibly into the moonlit sea.
When she turned the shell over
she found that she could not see its heart.
The blue-green side of the shell curled under like a smooth billow,
and then broke into a world of caves,
and caves within caves, whose final secret she could not discover.
But within and within the colour grew deeper and deeper,
bottomless blues and unfathomable greens,
shot with such gleams of light as made her heart throb,
for they were like the gleams that shoot through our dreams,
the light that eludes us when we wake.

(page 111)

I wish I could write with such beautiful narrative description...
Fortunately I have writers as gifted as Eleanor Farjeon to hone my gifts...