Read "Far off Things" by Arthur Machen online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The kind of life that I have been trying to indicate lasted for about eighteen months, and then my pupils mysteriously disappeared.
Mysteriously, I say, for I have completely forgotten what became of them, and by what ways they left me. At all events, they vanished, and I, being destitute, returned to Gwent and my old home. There they were almost as poor as poverty, but they were glad to see me. And I, waking in the morning to the brave breath from the mountain, wandering in the sunshine -- it was summer-time -- about the gardens and the orchards, revisiting the green, delicious heart of the twisted brake, listening once more to the water bubbling from the rock; I thought I had been translated from hell to paradise.