A String in the Harp
by
Nancy Bond

They were among the mountains now, the train following a valley between the great, stone-ribbed humps, patched with dead, rust-colored bracken. Jen had grown up among the hills of western Massachusetts, the Holyoke Range along the Connecticut River, and she loved them, but they had never given her the strange feeling these did. These seemed immensely ancient and wild. Without knowing their history, she knew they had one.

Welshpool was the first of a string of little stations they stopped at: a collection of low, gray stone houses and narrow streets. Jen couldn’t begin to pronounce most of the names of the towns.
Now, for the first time, she wondered what Borth would look like. It was a tiny dot on the map beside the sea with nothing to make it different from hundreds of other tiny dots. She wondered if it were pretty and had gardens or if it were a fishing village with a harbor and boats; her father’s letters had told her very little, really. Becky’s notes were mostly concerned with school and the people she met, and Peter never wrote at all.

 

 

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