initial commit of ebook 2496HEADmain

2 files changed, 5318 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/vllg10.txt b/old/vllg10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1cfff1c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/vllg10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5318 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+
+Our Village
+
+by Mary Russell Mitford
+
+February, 2001 [Etext #2496]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Our Village by Mary Russell Mitford
+******This file should be named vllg10.txt or vllg10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, vllg11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, vllg10a.txt
+
+
+This etext was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset from the
+1893 Macmillan and Co. edition.
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do usually do NOT! keep
+these books in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-six text
+files per month, or 432 more Etexts in 1999 for a total of 2000+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 200 billion Etexts given away this year.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only ~5% of the present number of computer users.
+
+At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third
+of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we
+manage to get some real funding; currently our funding is mostly
+from Michael Hart's salary at Carnegie-Mellon University, and an
+assortment of sporadic gifts; this salary is only good for a few
+more years, so we are looking for something to replace it, as we
+don't want Project Gutenberg to be so dependent on one person.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails. . .try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org
+if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if
+it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . .
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email.
+
+******
+
+To access Project Gutenberg etexts, use any Web browser
+to view http://promo.net/pg.  This site lists Etexts by
+author and by title, and includes information about how
+to get involved with Project Gutenberg.  You could also
+download our past Newsletters, or subscribe here.  This
+is one of our major sites, please email hart@pobox.com,
+for a more complete list of our various sites.
+
+To go directly to the etext collections, use FTP or any
+Web browser to visit a Project Gutenberg mirror (mirror
+sites are available on 7 continents; mirrors are listed
+at http://promo.net/pg).
+
+Mac users, do NOT point and click, typing works better.
+
+Example FTP session:
+
+ftp sunsite.unc.edu
+login: anonymous
+password: your@login
+cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg
+cd etext90 through etext99
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET GUTINDEX.??  [to get a year's listing of books, e.g.,
+GUTINDEX.99]
+GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books]
+
+***
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+OUR VILLAGE BY MARY RUSSELL MITFORD
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+INTRODUCTION
+COUNTRY PICTURES
+WALKS IN THE COUNTRY
+THE FIRST PRIMROSE
+VIOLETING
+THE COPSE
+THE WOOD
+THE DELL
+THE COWSLIP-BALL
+THE OLD HOUSE AT ABERLEIGH
+THE HARD SUMMER
+THE SHAW
+NUTTING
+THE VISIT
+HANNAH BINT
+THE FALL OF THE LEAF
+
+
+
+Introduction by Anne Thackeray Ritchie
+
+I.
+
+There is a great deal of admirable literature concerning Miss
+Mitford, so much of it indeed, that the writer of this little notice
+feels as if she almost owed an apology to those who remember, for
+having ventured to write, on hearsay only, and without having ever
+known or ever seen the author of 'Our Village.'  And yet, so vivid
+is the homely friendly presence, so clear the sound of that voice
+'like a chime of bells,' with its hospitable cheery greeting, that
+she can scarcely realise that this acquaintance exists only in the
+world of the might-have-beens.
+
+For people who are beginning to remember, rather than looking
+forward any more, there certainly exists no more delightful reading
+than the memoirs and stories of heroes and heroines, many of whom we
+ourselves may have seen, and to whom we may have spoken.  As we read
+on we are led into some happy bygone region,--such as that one
+described by Mr. du Maurier in 'Peter Ibbetson,'--a region in which
+we ourselves, together with all our friends and acquaintances, grow
+young again;--very young, very brisk, very hopeful.  The people we
+love are there, along with the people we remember.  Music begins to
+play, we are dancing, laughing, scampering over the country once
+more; our parents too are young and laughing cheerily.  Every now
+and then perhaps some old friend, also vigorous and hopeful, bursts
+into the book, and begins to talk or to write a letter; early sights
+and sounds return to us, we have NOW, and we have THEN, in a
+pleasant harmony.  To those of a certain literary generation who
+read Miss Mitford's memoirs, how many such familiar presences and
+names must appear and reappear.  Not least among them that of her
+biographer, Mr. Harness himself, who was so valued by his friends.
+Mrs. Kemble, Mrs. Sartoris, Charles Allston Collins, always talked
+of him with a great respect and tenderness.  I used to think they
+had a special voice with which to speak his name.  He was never
+among our intimate friends, but how familiar to my recollection are
+the two figures, that of Mr. Harness and Miss Harness, his sister
+and housekeeper, coming together along the busy Kensington roadway.
+The brother and sister were like characters out of some book, with
+their kind faces, their simple spiritual ways; in touch with so much
+that was interesting and romantic, and in heart with so much that
+suffered.  I remember him with grey hair and a smile.  He was not
+tall; he walked rather lame; Miss Harness too was little, looking up
+at all the rest of the world with a kind round face and sparkling
+eyes fringed with thick lashes.  Mary Mitford was indeed happy in
+her friends, as happy as she was unfortunate in her nearer
+relations.
+
+With much that is sad, there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment
+in Miss Mitford's life.  For her the absence of material happiness
+was made up for by the presence of warm-hearted sensibility, of
+enthusiasm, by her devotion to her parents. Her long endurance and
+filial piety are very remarkable, her loving heart carried her
+safely to the end, and she found comfort in her unreasoning life's
+devotion. She had none of the restlessness which is so apt to spoil
+much that might be harmonious; all the charm of a certain unity and
+simplicity of motive is hers, 'the single eye,' of which Charles
+Kingsley wrote so sweetly.  She loved her home, her trees, her
+surrounding lanes and commons.  She loved her friends.  Her books
+and flowers are real and important events in her life, soothing and
+distracting her from the contemplation of its constant anxieties.
+'I may truly say,' she once writes to Miss Barrett, 'that ever since
+I was a very young girl, I have never (although for some years
+living apparently in affluence) been without pecuniary care,--the
+care that pressed upon my thoughts the last thing at night, and woke
+in the morning with a dreary sense of pain and pressure, of
+something which weighed me to the earth.'
+
+Mary Russell Mitford was born on the 16th of December 1787.  She was
+the only child of her parents, who were well connected; her mother
+was an heiress.  Her father belonged to the Mitfords of the North.
+She describes herself as 'a puny child, with an affluence of curls
+which made her look as if she were twin sister to her own great
+doll.'  She could read at three years old; she learnt the Percy
+ballads by heart almost before she could read.  Long after, she used
+to describe how she first studied her beloved ballads in the
+breakfast-room lined with books, warmly spread with its Turkey
+carpet, with its bright fire, easy chairs, and the windows opening
+to a garden full of flowers,--stocks, honeysuckles, and pinks.  It
+is touching to note how, all through her difficult life, her path
+was (literally) lined with flowers, and how the love of them
+comforted and cheered her from the first to the very last.  In her
+saddest hours, the passing fragrance and beauty of her favourite
+geraniums cheered and revived her.  Even when her mother died she
+found comfort in the plants they had tended together, and at the
+very last breaks into delighted descriptions of them.
+
+She was sent to school in the year 1798 to No. 22 Hans Place, to a
+Mrs. St. Quintin's.  It seems to have been an excellent
+establishment.  Mary learnt the harp and astronomy; her taste for
+literature was encouraged.  The young ladies, attired as
+shepherdesses, were also taught to skip through many mazy movements,
+but she never distinguished herself as a shepherdess.  She had
+greater success in her literary efforts, and her composition 'on
+balloons' was much applauded.  She returned to her home in 18O2.
+'Plain in figure and in face, she was never common-looking,' says
+Mr. Harness.  He gives a pretty description of her as 'no ordinary
+child, her sweet smiles, her animated conversation, her keen
+enjoyment of life, and her gentle voice won the love and admiration
+of her friends, whether young or old.'  Mr. Harness has chiefly told
+Miss Mitford's story in her own words by quotations from her
+letters, and, as one reads, one can almost follow her moods as they
+succeed each other, and these moods are her real history.  The
+assiduity of childhood, the bright enthusiasm and gaiety of her
+early days, the growing anxiety of her later life, the maturer
+judgments, the occasional despairing terrors which came to try her
+bright nature, but along with it all, that innocent and enduring
+hopefulness which never really deserted her.  Her elastic spirit she
+owed to her father, that incorrigible old Skimpole.  'I am generally
+happy everywhere,' she writes in her youth--and then later on:  'It
+is a great pleasure to me to love and to admire, this is a faculty
+which has survived many frosts and storms.'  It is true that she
+adds a query somewhere else, 'Did you ever remark how superior old
+gaiety is to new?' she asks.
+
+Her handsome father, her plain and long-enduring mother, are both
+unconsciously described in her correspondence.  'The Doctor's
+manners were easy, natural, cordial, and apparently extremely
+frank,' says Mr. Harness, 'but he nevertheless met the world on its
+own terms, and was prepared to allow himself any insincerity which
+seemed expedient.  He was not only recklessly extravagant, but
+addicted to high play.  His wife's large fortune, his daughter's,
+his own patrimony, all passed through his hands in an incredibly
+short space of time, but his wife and daughter were never heard to
+complain of his conduct, nor appeared to admire him less.'
+
+The story of Miss Mitford's 2O,OOO pounds is unique among the
+adventures of authoresses.  Dr. Mitford, having spent all his wife's
+fortune, and having brought his family from a comfortable home, with
+flowers and a Turkey carpet, to a small lodging near Blackfriars
+Bridge, determined to present his daughter with an expensive lottery
+ticket on the occasion of her tenth birthday.  She had a fancy for
+No. 2224, of which the added numbers came to 10.  This number
+actually came out the first prize of 2O,OOO pounds, which money
+started the family once more in comparative affluence.  Dr. Mitford
+immediately built a new square house, which he calls Bertram House,
+on the site of a pretty old farmhouse which he causes to be pulled
+down.  He also orders a dessert-service painted with the Mitford
+arms; Mrs. Mitford is supplied with a carriage, and she subscribes
+to a circulating library.
+
+A list still exists of the books taken out by her for her daughter's
+use; some fifty-five volumes a month, chiefly trash:  'Vicenza,' 'A
+Sailor's Friendship and Soldier's Love,' 'Clarentina,' 'Robert and
+Adela,' 'The Count de Valmont,' 'The Three Spaniards,' 'De Clifford'
+(in four volumes) and so on.
+
+The next two or three years were brilliant enough; for the family
+must have lived at the rate of three or four thousand a year.  Their
+hospitality was profuse, they had servants, carriages, they bought
+pictures and furniture, they entertained.  Cobbett was among their
+intimate friends.  The Doctor naturally enough invested in a good
+many more lottery tickets, but without any further return.
+
+The ladies seem to take it as a matter of course that he should
+speculate and gamble at cards, and indeed do anything and everything
+he fancied, but they beg him at least to keep to respectable clubs.
+He is constantly away.  His daughter tries to tempt him home with
+the bloom of her hyacinths.  'How they long to see him again!' she
+says, 'how greatly have they been disappointed, when, every day, the
+journey to Reading has been fruitless.  The driver of the Reading
+coach is quite accustomed to being waylaid by their carriage.'  Then
+she tells him about the primroses, but neither hyacinths nor
+primroses bring the Doctor away from his cards.  Finally, the
+rhododendrons and the azaleas are in bloom, but these also fail to
+attract him.
+
+Miss Mitford herself as she grows up is sent to London more than
+once, to the St.  Quintin's and elsewhere.  She goes to the play and
+to Westminster Hall, she sees her hero, Charles James Fox, and has
+the happiness of watching him helped on to his horse.  Mr. Romilly
+delights her, but her greatest favourite of all is Mr. Whitbread.
+'You know I am always an enthusiast,' she writes, 'but at present it
+is impossible to describe the admiration I feel for this exalted
+character.'  She speaks of his voice 'which she could listen to with
+transport even if he spoke in an unknown language!' she writes a
+sonnet to him, 'an impromptu, on hearing Mr. Whitbread declare in
+Westminster Hall that he fondly trusted his name would descend to
+posterity.'
+
+     'The hope of Fame thy noble bosom fires,
+      Nor vain the hope thy ardent mind inspires;
+      In British breasts whilst Purity remains,
+      Whilst Liberty her blessed abode retains,
+      Still shall the muse of History proclaim
+      To future ages thy immortal name!'
+
+There are many references to the celebrities of the time in her
+letters home,--every one agrees as to the extreme folly of
+Sheridan's entertainments, Mrs. Opie is spoken of as a rising
+authoress, etc. etc. etc.
+
+Miss Austen used to go to 23 Hans Place, and Miss Mitford used to
+stay at No. 22, but not at the same time.  Mrs. Mitford had known
+Miss Austen as a child.  She may perhaps be forgiven for some
+prejudice and maternal jealousy, in her later impressions, but Mary
+Mitford admired Jane Austen always with warmest enthusiasm.  She
+writes to her mother at length from London, describing everything,
+all the people and books and experiences that she comes across,--the
+elegant suppers at Brompton, the Grecian lamps, Mr. Barker's beauty,
+Mr. Plummer's plainness, and the destruction of her purple gown.
+
+Mrs. Mitford writes back in return describing Reading festivities,
+'an agreeable dinner at Doctor Valpy's, where Mrs. Women and Miss
+Peacock are present and Mr. J. Simpson, M.P.; the dinner very good,
+two full courses and one remove, the soup giving place to one
+quarter of lamb.'  Mrs. Mitford sends a menu of every dinner she
+goes to.
+
+In 1806 Dr. Mitford takes his daughter, who was then about nineteen,
+to the North to visit his relations; they are entertained by the
+grandparents of the Trevelyans and the Swinburnes, the Ogles and the
+Mitfords of the present day.  They fish in Sir John Swinburne's
+lake, they visit at Alnwick Castle.  Miss Mitford kept her front
+hair in papers till she reached Alnwick, nor was her dress
+discomposed though she had travelled thirty miles.  They sat down,
+sixty-five to dinner, which was 'of course' (she somewhat
+magnificently says) entirely served on plate.  Poor Mary's pleasure
+is very much dashed by the sudden disappearance of her father,--Dr.
+Mitford was in the habit of doing anything he felt inclined to do at
+once and on the spot, quite irrespectively of the convenience of
+others,--and although a party had been arranged on purpose to meet
+him in the North, and his daughter was counting on his escort to
+return home, (people posted in those days, they did not take their
+tickets direct from Newcastle to London), Dr. Mitford one morning
+leaves word that he has gone off to attend the Reading election,
+where his presence was not in the least required.  For the first and
+apparently for the only time in her life his daughter protests.
+'Mr. Ogle is extremely offended; nothing but your immediate return
+can ever excuse you to him!  I IMPLORE you to return, I call upon
+Mamma's sense of propriety to send you here directly.  Little did I
+suspect that my father, my beloved father, would desert me at this
+distance from home!  Every one is surprised.'  Dr. Mitford was
+finally persuaded to travel back to Northumberland to fetch his
+daughter.
+
+The constant companionship of Dr. Mitford must have given a curious
+colour to his good and upright daughter's views of life.  Adoring
+her father as she did, she must have soon accustomed herself to take
+his fine speeches for fine actions, to accept his self-complacency
+in the place of a conscience.  She was a woman of warm impressions,
+with a strong sense of right.  But it was not within her daily
+experience, poor soul, that people who did not make grand
+professions were ready to do their duty all the same; nor did she
+always depend upon the uprightness, the courage, the self-denial of
+those who made no protestations.  At that time loud talking was
+still the fashion, and loud living was considered romantic.  They
+both exist among us, but they are less admired, and there is a
+different language spoken now to that of Dr. Mitford and his
+school.*  This must account for some of Miss Mitford's judgments of
+what she calls a 'cynical' generation, to which she did little
+justice.
+
+*People nowadays are more ready to laugh than to admire when they
+hear the lions bray; for mewing and bleating, the taste, I fear, is
+on the increase.
+
+II.
+
+There is one penalty people pay for being authors, which is that
+from cultivating vivid impressions and mental pictures they are apt
+to take fancies too seriously and to mistake them for reality.  In
+story-telling this is well enough, and it interferes with nobody;
+but in real history, and in one's own history most of all, this
+faculty is apt to raise up bogies and nightmares along one's path;
+and while one is fighting imaginary demons, the good things and true
+are passed by unnoticed, the best realities of life are sometimes
+overlooked. . . .
+
+But after all, Mary Russell Mitford, who spent most of her time
+gathering figs off thistles and making the best of her difficult
+circumstances, suffered less than many people do from the influence
+of imaginary things.
+
+She was twenty-three years old when her first book of poems was
+published; so we read in her letters, in which she entreats her
+father not to curtail ANY of the verses addressed to him; there is
+no reason, she says, except his EXTREME MODESTY why the verses
+should be suppressed,--she speaks not only with the fondness of a
+daughter but with the sensibility of a poet.  Our young authoress is
+modest, although in print; she compares herself to Crabbe (as Jane
+Austen might have done), and feels 'what she supposes a farthing
+candle would experience when the sun rises in all its glory.'  Then
+comes the Publisher's bill for 59 pounds; she is quite shocked at
+the bill, which is really exorbitant!  In her next letter Miss
+Mitford reminds her father that the taxes are still unpaid, and a
+correspondence follows with somebody asking for a choice of the
+Doctor's pictures in payment for the taxes.  The Doctor is in London
+all the time, dining out and generally amusing himself.  Everybody
+is speculating whether Sir Francis Burdett will go to the Tower.*
+'Oh, my darling, how I envy you at the fountain-head of intelligence
+in these interesting times!  How I envy Lady Burdett for the fine
+opportunity she has to show the heroism of our sex!' writes the
+daughter, who is only encountering angry tax-gatherers at home. . .
+.  Somehow or other the bills are paid for the time, and the family
+arrangements go on as before.
+
+*Here, in our little suburban garden at Wimbledon, are the remains
+of an old hedgerow which used to grow in the kitchen garden of the
+Grange where Sir Francis Burdett then lived.  The tradition is that
+he was walking in the lane in his own kitchen garden when he was
+taken up and carried off to honourable captivity.--A.T.R.
+
+Besides writing to the members of her own home, Miss Mitford started
+another correspondent very early in life; this was Sir William
+Elford, to whom she describes her outings and adventures, her visits
+to Tavistock House, where her kind friends the Perrys receive her.
+Mr. Perry was the editor of the Morning Chronicle; he and his
+beautiful wife were the friends of all the most interesting people
+of the day.  Here again the present writer's own experiences can
+interpret the printed page, for her own first sight of London people
+and of London society came to her in a little house in Chesham
+Place, where her father's old friends, Mrs. Frederick Elliot and
+Miss Perry, the daughters of Miss Mitford's friends, lived with a
+very notable and interesting set of people, making a social centre,
+by that kindly unconscious art which cannot be defined; that quick
+apprehension, that benevolent fastidiousness (I have to use rather
+far-fetched words) which are so essential to good hosts and
+hostesses.  A different standard is looked for now, by the rising
+generations knocking at the doors, behind which the dignified past
+is lying as stark as King Duncan himself!
+
+Among other entertainments Miss Mitford went to the fetes which
+celebrated the battle of Vittoria; she had also the happiness of
+getting a good sight of Mme. de Stael, who was a great friend of the
+Perrys.  'She is almost as much followed in the gardens as the
+Princess,' she says, pouring out her wonders, her pleasures, her
+raptures.  She begins to read Burns with youthful delight, dilates
+upon his exhaustless imagination, his versatility, and then she
+suggests a very just criticism.  'Does it not appear' she says,
+'that versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare
+thing called genius--versatility and playfulness;' then she goes on
+to speak of two highly-reputed novels just come out and ascribed to
+Lady Morley, 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'Sense and Sensibility.'
+
+She is still writing from Bertram House, but her pleasant gossip
+continually alternates with more urgent and less agreeable letters
+addressed to her father.  Lawyers' clerks are again calling with
+notices and warnings, tax-gatherers are troubling.  Dr. Mitford has,
+as usual, left no address, so that she can only write to the 'Star
+Office,' and trust to chance.  'Mamma joins in tenderest love,' so
+the letters invariably conclude.
+
+Notwithstanding the adoration bestowed by the ladies of the family
+and their endearing adjectives, Mr. Harness is very outspoken on the
+subject of the handsome Doctor!  He disliked his manners, his
+morals, his self-sufficiency, his loud talk.  'The old brute never
+informed his friends of anything; all they knew of him or his
+affairs, or whatever false or true he intended them to believe, came
+out carelessly in his loose, disjointed talk.'
+
+In 1814 Miss Mitford is living on still with her parents at Bertram
+House, but a change has come over their home; the servants are gone,
+the gravel turned to moss, the turf into pasture, the shrubberies to
+thickets, the house a sort of new 'ruin half inhabited, and a
+Chancery suit is hanging over their heads.'  Meantime some news
+comes to cheer her from America.  Two editions of her poems have
+been printed and sold.  'Narrative Poems on the Female Character'
+proved a real success.  'All who have hearts to feel and
+understandings to discriminate, must wish you health and leisure to
+complete your plan,' so write publishers in those golden days, with
+complimentary copies of the work. . . .
+
+Great things are happening all this time; battles are being fought
+and won, Napoleon is on his way to St. Helena; London is in a frenzy
+of rejoicings, entertainings, illuminations.  To Mary Mitford the
+appearance of 'Waverley' seems as great an event as the return of
+the Bourbons; she is certain that 'Waverley' is written by Sir
+Walter Scott, but 'Guy Mannering,' she thinks, is by another hand:
+her mind is full of a genuine romantic devotion to books and belles
+lettres, and she is also rejoicing, even more, in the spring-time of
+1816.  Dr. Mitford may be impecunious and their affairs may be
+threadbare, but the lovely seasons come out ever in fresh beauty and
+abundance.  The coppices are carpeted with primroses, with pansies
+and wild strawberry blossom,--the woods are spangled with the
+delicate flowers of the woodsorrel and wood anemone, the meadows
+enamelled with cowslips. . . .  Certainly few human beings were ever
+created more fit for this present world, and more capable of
+admiring and enjoying its beauties, than Miss Mitford, who only
+desired to be beautiful herself, she somewhere says, to be perfectly
+contented.
+
+III.
+
+Most people's lives are divided into first, second and third
+volumes; and as we read Miss Mitford's history it forms no exception
+to the rule.  The early enthusiastic volume is there, with its hopes
+and wild judgments, its quaint old-fashioned dress and phraseology;
+then comes the second volume, full of actual work and serious
+responsibility, with those childish parents to provide for, whose
+lives, though so protracted, never seem to reach beyond their
+nurseries.  Miss Mitford's third volume is retrospective; her
+growing infirmities are courageously endured, there is the certainty
+of success well earned and well deserved; we realise her legitimate
+hold upon the outer world of readers and writers, besides the
+reputation which she won upon the stage by her tragedies.
+
+The literary ladies of the early part of the century in some ways
+had a very good time of it.  A copy of verses, a small volume of
+travels, a few tea-parties, a harp in one corner of the room, and a
+hat and feathers worn rather on one side, seemed to be all that was
+wanted to establish a claim to fashion and inspiration.  They had
+footstools to rest their satin shoes upon, they had admirers and
+panegyrists to their heart's content, and above all they possessed
+that peculiar complacency in which (with a few notable exceptions)
+our age is singularly deficient.  We are earnest, we are audacious,
+we are original, but we are not complacent.  THEY were dolls
+perhaps, and lived in dolls' houses; WE are ghosts without houses at
+all; we come and go wrapped in sheets of newspaper, holding
+flickering lights in our hands, paraffin lamps, by the light of
+which we are seeking our proper sphere.  Poor vexed spirits!  We do
+not belong to the old world any more!  The new world is not yet
+ready for us.  Even Mr. Gladstone will not let us into the House of
+Commons; the Geographical Society rejects us, so does the Royal
+Academy; and yet who could say that any of their standards rise too
+high!  Some one or two are happily safe, carried by the angels of
+the Press to little altars and pinnacles all their own; but the
+majority of hard-working, intelligent women, 'contented with little,
+yet ready for more,' may they not in moments of depression be
+allowed to picture to themselves what their chances might have been
+had they only been born half a century earlier?
+
+Miss Mitford, notwithstanding all her troubles (she has been known
+to say she had rather be a washerwoman than a literary lady), had
+opportunities such as few women can now obtain.  One is lost in
+admiration at the solidity of one's grandparents' taste, when one
+attempts to read the tragedies they delighted in, and yet 'Rienzi'
+sold four thousand copies and was acted forty-five times; and at one
+time Miss Mitford had two tragedies rehearsed upon the boards
+together; one at Covent Garden and one at Drury Lane, with Charles
+Kemble and Macready disputing for her work.  Has not one also read
+similar descriptions of the triumphs of Hannah More, or of Johanna
+Baillie; cheered by enthusiastic audiences, while men shed tears.*
+
+*Mem. Hannah More, v.i. p.124.
+
+'Julian' was the first of Miss Mitford's acted plays.  It was
+brought out at Covent Garden in 1823, when she was thirty-six years
+old; Macready played the principal part.  'If the play do reach the
+ninth night,' Miss Mitford writes to Macready, 'it will be a very
+complete refutation of Mr. Kemble's axiom that no single performer
+can fill the theatre; for except our pretty Alfonso (Miss Foote)
+there is only Julian, one and only one.  Let him imagine how deeply
+we feel his exertions and his kindness.*. . .'
+
+*In Macready's diary we find an entry which is not over gracious.
+'"Julian" acted March the 15th.  Had but moderate success.  The C.
+G. company was no longer equal to the support of plays containing
+moral characters.  The authoress in her dedication to me was profuse
+in her acknowledgments and compliments, but the performance made
+little impression, and was soon forgotten.'
+
+'Julian' was stopped on the eighth night, to her great
+disappointment, but she is already engaged on another--on several
+more---tragedies; she wants the money badly; for the editor of her
+magazine has absconded, owing her 50 pounds.  Some trying and
+bewildering quarrel then ensues between Charles Kemble and Macready,
+which puts off her tragedies, and sadly affects poor Miss Mitford's
+nerves and profits.  She has one solace.  Her father, partly
+instigated, she says, by the effect which the terrible feeling of
+responsibility and want of power has had upon her health and
+spirits, at last resolves to try if he can HIMSELF obtain any
+employment that may lighten the burthen of the home.  It is a good
+thing that Dr.  Mitford has braced himself to this heroic
+determination.  'The addition of two or even one hundred a year to
+our little income, joined to what I am, in a manner, sure of gaining
+by mere industry, would take a load from my heart of which I can
+scarcely give you an idea. . .  even "Julian" was written under a
+pressure of anxiety which left me not a moment's rest. . . .'  So
+she fondly dwells upon the delightful prospects.  Then comes the
+next letter to Sir William Elford, and we read that her dear father,
+'relying with a blessed sanguineness on my poor endeavours, has not,
+I believe, even inquired for a situation, and I do not press the
+matter, though I anxiously wish it; being willing to give one more
+trial to the theatre.'
+
+On one of the many occasions when Miss Mitford writes to her trustee
+imploring him to sell out the small remaining fragment of her
+fortune, she says, 'My dear father has, years ago, been improvident,
+is still irritable and difficult to live with, but he is a person of
+a thousand virtues. . .  there are very few half so good in this
+mixed world; it is my fault that this money is needed, entirely my
+fault, and if it be withheld, my dear father will be overthrown,
+mind and body, and I shall never know another happy hour.'
+
+No wonder Mr. Harness, who was behind the scenes, remonstrated
+against the filial infatuation which sacrificed health, sleep, peace
+of mind, to gratify every passing whim of the Doctor's.  At a time
+when she was sitting up at night and slaving, hour after hour, to
+earn the necessary means of living, Dr. Mitford must needs have a
+cow, a stable, and dairy implements procured for his amusement, and
+when he died he left 1,000 pounds of debts for the scrupulous woman
+to pay off.  She is determined to pay, if she sells her clothes to
+do so.  Meanwhile, the Doctor is still alive, and Miss Mitford is
+straining every nerve to keep him so.  She is engaged (in strict
+confidence) on a grand historical subject, Charles and Cromwell, the
+finest episode in English history, she says.  Here, too, fresh
+obstacles arise.  This time it is the theatrical censor who
+interferes.  It would be dangerous for the country to touch upon
+such topics; Mr. George Colman dwells upon this theme, although he
+gives the lady full credit for no evil intentions; but for the
+present all her work is again thrown away.  While Miss Mitford is
+struggling on as best she can against this confusion of worries and
+difficulty (she eventually received 2OO pounds for 'Julian' from a
+Surrey theatre), a new firm 'Whittaker' undertakes to republish the
+'village sketches' which had been written for the absconding editor.
+The book is to be published under the title of 'Our Village.'
+
+IV.
+
+'Are your characters and descriptions true?' somebody once asked our
+authoress.  'Yes, yes, yes, as true, as true as is well possible,'
+she answers.  'You, as a great landscape painter, know that in
+painting a favourite scene you do a little embellish and can't help
+it; you avail yourself of happy accidents of atmosphere; if anything
+be ugly you strike it out, or if anything be wanting, you put it in.
+But still the picture is a likeness.'
+
+So wrote Miss Mitford, but with all due respect for her and for Sir
+William Elford, the great landscape painter, I cannot help thinking
+that what is admirable in her book, are not her actual descriptions
+and pictures of intelligent villagers and greyhounds, but the more
+imaginative things; the sense of space and nature and progress which
+she knows how to convey; the sweet and emotional chord she strikes
+with so true a touch.  Take at hazard her description of the sunset.
+How simple and yet how finely felt it is.  Her genuine delight
+reaches us and carries us along; it is not any embellishing of
+effects, or exaggeration of facts, but the reality of a true and
+very present feeling. . .  'The narrow line of clouds which a few
+minutes ago lay like long vapouring streaks along the horizon, now
+lighted with a golden splendour, that the eye can scarcely endure;
+those still softer clouds which floated above, wreathing and curling
+into a thousand fantastic forms as thin and changeful as summer
+smoke, defined and deepened into grandeur, and hedged with
+ineffable, insufferable light.  Another minute and the brilliant orb
+totally disappears and the sky above grows, every moment, more
+varied and more beautiful, as the dazzling golden lines are mixed
+with glowing red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark
+specks, and mingled with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-
+sparrow. . . .  To look up at that glorious sky, and then to see
+that magnificent picture reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon
+water, is a pleasure never to be described, and never to be
+forgotten.  My heart swells, and my eyes fill as I write of it, and
+think of the immeasurable majesty of nature and the unspeakable
+goodness of God, who has spread an enjoyment so pure, so peaceful,
+and so intense before the meanest and lowliest of His creatures.'
+
+But it is needless now to go on praising 'Our Village,' or to
+recount what a success was in store for the little book.  Certain
+books hold their own by individual right and might; they are part of
+everybody's life as a matter of course.  They are not always read,
+but they tacitly take their place among us.  The editions succeeded
+editions here and in America; artists came down to illustrate the
+scenes.  Miss Mitford, who was so delighted with the drawings by Mr.
+Baxter, should have lived to see the charming glimpses of rural life
+we owe to Mr. Thomson.  'I don't mind 'em,' says Lizzy to the cows,
+as they stand with spirited bovine grace behind the stable door.
+'Don't mind them indeed!'
+
+I think the author would assuredly have enjoyed the picture of the
+baker, the wheelwright and the shoemaker, each following his special
+Alderney along the road to the village, or of the farmer driving his
+old wife in the gig. . . .  One design, that of the lady in her
+pattens, comes home to the writer of these notes, who has perhaps
+the distinction of being the only authoress now alive who has ever
+walked out in pattens.  At the age of seven years she was provided
+with a pair by a great-great-aunt, a kind old lady living at
+Fareham, in Hampshire, where they were still in use.  How
+interesting the little circles looked stamped upon the muddy road,
+and how nearly down upon one's nose one was at every other step!
+
+But even with all her success, Miss Mitford was not out of her
+troubles.  She writes to Mr. Harness saying:  'You cannot imagine
+how perplexed I am.  There are points in my domestic situation too
+long and too painful to write about; the terrible improvidence of
+one dear parent, the failure of memory and decay of faculty in that
+other who is still dearer, cast on me a weight of care and fear that
+I can hardly bear up against.'  Her difficulties were unending.  The
+new publisher now stopped payment, so that even 'Our Village'
+brought in no return for the moment; Charles Kemble was unable to
+make any offer for 'Foscari.'  She went up to town in the greatest
+hurry to try and collect some of the money owing to her from her
+various publishers, but, as Mr. Harness says, received little from
+her debtors beyond invitations and compliments.  She meditates a
+novel, she plans an opera, 'Cupid and Psyche.'
+
+At last, better times began to dawn, and she receives 150 pounds
+down for a new novel and ten guineas from Blackwood as a retaining
+fee.  Then comes a letter from Charles Kemble giving her new hope,
+for her tragedy, which was soon afterwards produced at Covent
+Garden.
+
+The tragedies are in tragic English, of course that language of the
+boards, but not without a simplicity and music of their own.  In the
+introduction to them, in some volumes published by Hurst and Blacket
+in 1854, Miss Mitford describes 'the scene of indescribable chaos
+preceding the performance, the vague sense of obscurity and
+confusion; tragedians, hatted and coated, skipping about, chatting
+and joking; the only very grave person being Liston himself.
+Ballet-girls walking through their quadrilles to the sound of a
+solitary fiddle, striking up as if of its own accord, from amid the
+tall stools and music-desks of the orchestra, and piercing, one
+hardly knew how, through the din that was going on incessantly.  Oh,
+that din!  Voices from every part; above, below, around, and in
+every key.  Heavy weights rolling here and falling there.  Bells
+ringing, one could not tell why, and the ubiquitous call-boy
+everywhere.'
+
+She describes her astonishment when the play succeeds.  'Not that I
+had nerve enough to attend the first representation of my tragedies.
+I sat still and trembling in some quiet apartment near, and thither
+some friend flew to set my heart at ease.  Generally the messenger
+of good tidings was poor Haydon, whose quick and ardent spirit lent
+him wings on such an occasion.'
+
+We have the letter to her mother about 'Foscari,' from which I have
+quoted; and on the occasion of the production of 'Rienzi' at Drury
+Lane (two years later in October 1828), the letter to Sir William
+Elford when the poor old mother was no longer here to rejoice in her
+daughter's success.
+
+Miss Mitford gratefully records the sympathy of her friends, the
+warm-hearted muses of the day.  Mrs. Trollope, Miss Landon, Miss
+Edgeworth, Miss Porden, Mrs. Hofland, Mrs. Opie, who all appear with
+their congratulations.
+
+Miss Mitford says that Haydon, above all, sympathised with her love
+for a large canvas.  The Classics, Spain, Italy, Mediaeval Rome,
+these are her favourite scenes and periods.  Dukes and tribunes were
+her heroes; daggers, dungeons, and executioners her means of
+effects.
+
+She moralises very sensibly upon Dramatic success.  'It is not,' she
+says, 'so delicious, so glorious, so complete a gratification as, in
+our secret longings, we all expect.  It does not fill the heart,--it
+is an intoxication followed by a dismal reaction.'  She tells a
+friend that never in all her life was she so depressed and out of
+spirits as after 'Rienzi,' her first really successful venture.  But
+there is also a passing allusion to her father's state of mind, to
+his mingled irritation and sulkiness, which partly explains things.
+Could it be that the Doctor added petty jealousy and envy to his
+other inconvenient qualities?  His intolerance for any author or
+actor, in short, for any one not belonging to a county family, his
+violent annoyance at any acquaintances such as those which she now
+necessarily made, would naturally account for some want of spirits
+on the daughter's part; overwrought, over-taxed, for ever on the
+strain, her work was exhausting indeed.  The small pension she
+afterwards obtained from the Civil List must have been an
+unspeakable boon to the poor harassed woman.
+
+Tragedy seems to have resulted in a substantial pony and a basket
+carriage for Miss Mitford, and in various invitations (from the
+Talfourds, among the rest) during which she is lionised right and
+left.  It must have been on this occasion that Serjeant Talfourd
+complained so bitterly of a review of 'Ion' which appeared about
+that time.  His guest, to soothe him, unwarily said, 'she should not
+have minded such a review of HER Tragedy.'
+
+'YOUR "Rienzi," indeed!  I should think not,' says the serjeant.
+'"Ion" is very different.'  The Talfourd household, as it is
+described by Mr. Lestrange, is a droll mixture of poetry and prose,
+of hospitality, of untidiness, of petulance, of most genuine
+kindness and most genuine human nature.
+
+There are also many mentions of Miss Mitford in the 'Life of
+Macready' by Sir F.  Pollock.  The great tragedian seems not to have
+liked her with any cordiality; but he gives a pleasant account of a
+certain supper-party in honour of 'Ion' at which she is present, and
+during which she asks Macready if he will not now bring out her
+tragedy.  The tragedian does not answer, but Wordsworth, sitting by,
+says, 'Ay, keep him to it.'
+
+V.
+
+Besides the 'Life of Miss Mitford' by Messrs. Harness and Lestrange,
+there is also a book of the 'Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford,'
+consisting of the letters she received rather than of those which
+she wrote.  It certainly occurs to one, as one looks through the
+printed correspondence of celebrated people, how different are
+written from printed letters.  Your friend's voice sounds, your
+friend's eyes look out, of the written page, even its blots and
+erasures remind you of your human being.  But the magnetism is gone
+out of these printer's lines with their even margins; in which
+everybody's handwriting is exactly alike; in which everybody uses
+the same type, the same expressions; in which the eye roams from
+page to page untouched, unconvinced.  I can imagine the pleasure
+each one of these letters may have given to Miss Mitford to receive
+in turn.  They come from well-known ladies, accustomed to be
+considered.  Mrs. Trollope, Mrs. Hofland, Mrs. Howitt, Mrs. S. C.
+Hall, Miss Strickland, Mrs. Opie; there, too, are Miss Barrett and
+Mrs. Jamieson and Miss Sedgwick who writes from America; they are
+all interesting people, but it must be confessed that the
+correspondence is not very enlivening.  Miss Barrett's is an
+exception, that is almost as good as handwriting to read.  But there
+is no doubt that compliments to OTHER authoresses are much less
+amusing, than those one writes or receives oneself; apologies also
+for not writing sooner, CAN pall upon one in print, however soothing
+they may be to the justly offended recipient, or to the
+conscience-stricken correspondent.
+
+'I must have seemed a thankless wretch, my dear Miss Mitford,' etc.
+etc.  'You, my dear friend, know too well what it is to have to
+finish a book, to blame my not attempting,' etc. etc.  'This is the
+thirty-ninth letter I have written since yesterday morning,' says
+Harriet Martineau.  'Oh, I can scarcely hold the pen!  I will not
+allow my shame for not having written, to prevent me from writing
+now.'  All these people seem to have been just as busy as people are
+now, as amusing, as tiresome.  They had the additional difficulty of
+having to procure franks, and of having to cover four pages instead
+of a post-card.  OUR letters may be dull, but at all events they are
+not nearly so long.  We come sooner to the point and avoid elegant
+circumlocutions.  But one is struck, among other things, by the
+keener literary zest of those days, and by the immense numbers of
+MSS. and tragedies in circulation, all of which their authors
+confidingly send from one to another.  There are also whole flights
+of travelling poems flapping their wings and uttering their cries as
+they go.
+
+An enthusiastic American critic who comes over to England emphasises
+the situation.  Mr. Willis's 'superlative admiration' seems to give
+point to everything, and to all the enthusiasm.  Miss Austen's
+Collins himself could not have been more appreciative, not even if
+Miss de Burgh had tried her hand at a MS. . . .  Could he--Mr.
+Willis--choose, he would have tragedy once a year from Miss
+Mitford's pen.  'WHAT an intoxicating life it is,' he cries; 'I met
+Jane Porter and Miss Aikin and Tom Moore and a troop more beaux
+esprits at dinner yesterday!  I never shall be content elsewhere.'
+
+Miss Mitford's own letters speak in a much more natural voice.
+
+'I never could understand what people could find to like in my
+letters,' Miss Mitford writes, 'unless it be that they have a ROOT
+to them.'  The root was in her own kind heart.  Miss Mitford may
+have been wanting a little in discrimination, but she was never
+wanting in sympathy.  She seems to have loved people for kindness's
+sake indiscriminately as if they were creations of her own brain:
+but to friendliness or to trouble of any sort she responds with
+fullest measure.  Who shall complain if some rosy veil coloured the
+aspects of life for her?
+
+'Among the many blessings I enjoy,--my dear father, my admirable
+mother, my tried and excellent friends,--there is nothing for which
+I ought to thank God so earnestly as for the constitutional buoyancy
+of spirits, the aptness to hope, the will to be happy WHICH I
+INHERIT FROM MY FATHER,' she writes.  Was ever filial piety so
+irritating as hers?  It is difficult to bear, with any patience, her
+praises of Dr. Mitford.  His illusions were no less a part of his
+nature than his daughter's, the one a self-centred absolutely
+selfish existence, the other generous, humble, beautiful.  She is
+hardly ever really angry except when some reports get about
+concerning her marriage.  There was an announcement that she was
+engaged to one of her own clan, and the news spread among her
+friends.  The romantic Mrs. Hofland had conjured up the suggestion,
+to Miss Mitford's extreme annoyance.  It is said Mrs. Hofland also
+married off Miss Edgeworth in the same manner.
+
+Mary Mitford found her true romance in friendship, not in love.  One
+day Mr. Kenyon came to see her while she was staying in London, and
+offered to show her the Zoological Gardens, and on the way he
+proposed calling in Gloucester Place to take up a young lady, a
+connection of his own, Miss Barrett by name.  It was thus that Miss
+Mitford first made the acquaintance of Mrs. Browning, whose
+friendship was one of the happiest events of her whole life.  A
+happy romance indeed, with that added reality which must have given
+it endurance.  And indeed to make a new friend is like learning a
+new language.  I myself have a friend who says that we have each one
+of us a chosen audience of our own to whom we turn instinctively,
+and before whom we rehearse that which is in our minds; whose
+opinion influences us, whose approval is our secret aim.  All this
+Mrs. Browning seems to have been to Miss Mitford.
+
+'I sit and think of you and of the poems that you will write, and of
+that strange rainbow crown called fame, until the vision is before
+me. . . .  My pride and my hopes seem altogether merged in you.  At
+my time of life and with so few to love, and with a tendency to body
+forth images of gladness, you cannot think what joy it is to
+anticipate. . . .'  So wrote the elder woman to the younger with
+romantic devotion.  What Miss Mitford once said of herself was true,
+hers was the instinct of the bee sucking honey from the hedge
+flower.  Whatever sweetness and happiness there was to find she
+turned to with unerring directness.
+
+It is to Miss Barrett that she sometimes complains.  'It will help
+you to understand how impossible it is for me to earn money as I
+ought to do, when I tell you that this very day I received your dear
+letter and sixteen others; then my father brought into my room the
+newspaper to hear the ten or twelve columns of news from India; then
+I dined and breakfasted in one; then I got up, and by that time
+there were three parties of people in the garden; eight others
+arrived soon after. . . .  I was forced to leave, being engaged to
+call on Lady Madeline Palmer.  She took me some six miles on foot in
+Mr. Palmer's beautiful plantations, in search of that exquisite
+wild-flower the bog-bean, do you know it? most beautiful of flowers,
+either wild--or, as K. puts it,--"tame."  After long search we found
+the plant not yet in bloom.'
+
+Dr. Mitford weeps over his daughters exhaustion, telling everybody
+that she is killing herself by her walks and drives.  He would like
+her never to go beyond the garden and beyond reach of the columns of
+his newspaper.  She declares that it is only by getting out and
+afield that she can bear the strain and the constant alternation of
+enforced work and anxiety.  Nature was, indeed, a second nature to
+her.  Charles Kingsley himself could scarcely write better of the
+East wind. . . .
+
+'We have had nine weeks of drought and east wind, scarcely a flower
+to be seen, no verdure in the meadows, no leaves in the hedgerows;
+if a poor violet or primrose did make its appearance it was
+scentless.  I have not once heard my aversion the cuckoo. . .  and
+in this place, so evidently the rendezvous of swallows, that it
+takes its name from them, not a swallow has yet appeared.  The only
+time that I have heard the nightingale, I drove, the one mild day we
+have had, to a wood where I used to find the woodsorrel in beds;
+only two blossoms of that could be found, but a whole chorus of
+nightingales saluted me the moment I drove into the wood.'
+
+There is something of Madame de Sevigne in her vivid realisation of
+natural things.
+
+She nursed her father through a long and trying illness, and when he
+died found herself alone in the world with impaired health and very
+little besides her pension from the Civil List to live upon.  Dr.
+Mitford left 1000 pounds worth of debts, which this honourable woman
+then and there set to work to try and pay.  So much courage and
+devotion touched the hearts of her many friends and readers, and
+this sum was actually subscribed by them.  Queens, archbishops,
+dukes, and marquises subscribe to the testimonial, so do the
+literary ladies, Mesdames Bailey, Edgeworth, Trollope; Mrs. Opie is
+determined to collect twenty pounds at least, although she justly
+says she wishes it were for anything but to pay the Doctor's debts.
+
+In 1844 it is delightful to read of a little ease at last in this
+harassed life; of a school-feast with buns and flags organised by
+the kind lady, the children riding in waggons decked with laurel,
+Miss Mitford leading the way, followed by eight or ten neighbouring
+carriages, and the whole party waiting in Swallowfield Lane to see
+the Queen and Prince Albert returning from their visit to the Duke
+of Wellington.  'Our Duke went to no great expense,' says Miss
+Mitford.  (Dr. Mitford would have certainly disapproved had he been
+still alive.)  One strip of carpet the Duke did buy, the rest of the
+furniture he hired in Reading for the week.  The ringers, after
+being hard at work for four hours, sent a can to the house to ask
+for some beer, and the can was sent back empty.
+
+It was towards the end of her life that Miss Mitford left Three Mile
+Cross and came to Swallowfield to stay altogether.  'The poor
+cottage was tumbling around us, and if we had stayed much longer we
+should have been buried in the ruins,' she says; 'there I had toiled
+and striven and tasted as bitterly of bitter anxiety, of fear and
+hope, as often falls to the lot of women.'  Then comes a charming
+description of the three miles of straight and dusty road.  'I
+walked from one cottage to the other on an autumn evening when the
+vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling there for their annual
+departure, gives, I suppose, its name of Swallowfield to the
+village, were circling over my head, and I repeated to myself the
+pathetic lines of Hayley as he saw those same birds gathering upon
+his roof during his last illness:--
+
+     '"Ye gentle birds, that perch aloof,
+       And smooth your pinions on my roof. . .
+
+     '"Prepare for your departure hence
+       Ere winter's angry threats commence;
+       Like you my soul would smooth her plume
+       For longer flights beyond the tomb.
+
+     '"May God by whom is seen and heard
+       Departing men and wandering bird,
+       In mercy mark us for His own
+       And guide us to the land unknown!"'
+
+Thoughts soothing and tender came with those touching lines, and
+gayer images followed. . . .
+
+It is from Swallowfield that she writes:  'I have fell this blessing
+of being able to respond to new friendships very strongly lately,
+for I have lost many old and valued connections during this trying
+spring.  I thank God far more earnestly for such blessings than for
+my daily bread, for friendship is the bread of the heart.'
+
+It was late in life to make such warm new ties as those which
+followed her removal from Three Mile Cross; but some of the most
+cordial friendships of her life date from this time.  Mr. James Payn
+and Mr. Fields she loved with some real motherly feeling, and Lady
+Russell who lived at the Hall became her tender and devoted friend.
+
+VI.
+
+We went down to Reading the other day, as so many of Miss Mitford's
+friends have done before, to look at 'our village' with our own
+eyes, and at the cottage in which she lived for so long.  A phaeton
+with a fast-stepping horse met us at the station and whirled us
+through the busy town and along the straight dusty road beyond it.
+As we drove along in the soft clouded sunshine I looked over the
+hedges on either side, and I could see fields and hedgerows and red
+roofs clustering here and there, while the low background of blue
+hills spread towards the horizon.  It was an unpretentious homely
+prospect intercepted each minute by the detestable advertisement
+hoardings recommending this or that rival pill.  'Tongues in trees'
+indeed, in a very different sense from the exiled duke's experience!
+Then we come within sight of the running brook, uncontaminated as
+yet; the river flowing cool and swift, without quack medicines
+stamped upon its waters:  we reach Whitley presently, with its
+pretty gabled hostel (Mrs. Mitford used to drive to Whitley and back
+for her airing), the dust rises on the fresh keen wind, the scent of
+the ripe corn is in the air, the cows stoop under the elm trees,
+looking exactly as they do in Mr. Thomson's pretty pictures, dappled
+and brown, with delicate legs and horns.  We pass very few people, a
+baby lugged along in its cart, and accompanied by its brothers and
+sisters; a fox-terrier comes barking at our wheels; at last the
+phaeton stops abruptly between two or three roadside houses, and the
+coachman, pointing with his whip, says, 'That is "The Mitford,"
+ma'am.--That's where Miss Mitford used to live!'
+
+Was that all?  I saw two or three commonplace houses skirting the
+dusty road, I saw a comfortable public-house with an elm tree, and
+beside it another grey unpretentious little house, with a slate roof
+and square walls, and an inscription, 'The Mitford,' painted over
+the doorway. . . .
+
+I had been expecting I knew not what; a spire, a pump, a green, a
+winding street:  my preconceived village in the air had immediately
+to be swept into space, and in its stead, behold the inn with its
+sign-post, and these half-dozen brick tenements, more or less cut to
+one square pattern!  So this was all! this was 'our village' of
+which the author had written so charmingly!  These were the sights
+the kind eyes had dwelt upon, seeing in them all, the soul of hidden
+things, rather than dull bricks and slates.  Except for one memory,
+Three Mile Cross would seem to be one of the dullest and most
+uninteresting of country places. . . .
+
+But we have Miss Mitford's own description.  'The Cross is not a
+borough, thank Heaven, either rotten or independent.  The
+inhabitants are quiet, peaceable
+people who would not think of visiting us, even if we had a knocker
+to knock at.  Our residence is a cottage' (she is writing to her
+correspondent, Sir William Elford), 'no, not a cottage, it does not
+deserve the name--a messuage or tenement such as a little farmer who
+had made 1400 pounds might retire to when he left off business to
+live on his means.  It consists of a series of closets, the largest
+of which may be about eight feet square, which they call parlours
+and kitchens and pantries, some of them minus a corner, which has
+been unnaturally filched for a chimney, others deficient in half a
+side, which has been truncated by a shelving roof.  Behind is a
+garden about the size of a good drawing-room, with an arbour, which
+is a complete sentry-box of privet.  On one side a public-house, on
+the other a village shop, and right opposite a cobbler's stall.
+Notwithstanding all this "the cabin," as Boabdil says, "is
+convenient."  It is within reach of my dear old walks, the banks
+where I find my violets, the meadows full of cowslips, and the woods
+where the woodsorrel blows. . . .  Papa has already had the
+satisfaction of setting the neighbourhood to rights and committing a
+disorderly person who was the pest of "The Cross" to Bridewell. . .
+.  Mamma has furbished up an old dairy; I have lost my only key and
+stuffed the garden with flowers.' . . . .  So writes the contented
+young woman.
+
+How much more delightful is all this than any commonplace stagey
+effect of lattice and gable; and with what pleasant unconscious art
+the writer of this letter describes what is NOT there and brings in
+her banks of violets to perfume the dull rooms.  The postscript to
+this letter is Miss Mitford all over.  'Pray excuse my blots and
+interlineations.  They have been caused by my attention being
+distracted by a nightingale in full song who is pouring a world of
+music through my window.'
+
+'Do you not like to meet with good company in your friends' hearts?'
+Miss Mitford says somewhere,--to no one better than to herself does
+this apply.  Her heart was full of gracious things, and the best of
+company was ever hers, 'La fleur de la hotte,' as Madame de Sevigne
+says.
+
+We walked into the small square hall where Dr. Mitford's bed was
+established after his illness, whilst visitors and all the rest of
+the household came and went through the kitchen door.  In the
+parlour, once kept for his private use, now sat a party of homely
+friends from Reading, resting and drinking tea:  we too were served
+with smoking cups, and poured our libation to her who once presided
+in the quiet place; and then the landlady took us round and about,
+showed us the kitchen with its comfortable corners and low
+window-frames--'I suppose this is scarcely changed at all?' said one
+of us.
+
+'Oh yes, ma'am,' says the housekeeper--'WE uses a Kitchener, Miss
+Mitford always kept an open range.'
+
+The garden, with its sentry-box of privet, exists no longer; an iron
+mission-room stands in its place, with the harmonium, the rows of
+straw chairs, the table and the candlesticks de circonstance.  Miss
+Mitford's picture hangs on the wall, a hand-coloured copy of one of
+her portraits.  The kindly homely features smile from the oils, in
+good humour and attentive intelligence.  The sentiment of to-day is
+assuredly to be found in the spirit of things rather than in their
+outward signs. . . .  Any one of us can feel the romance of a
+wayside shrine put up to the memory of some mediaeval well-dressed
+saint with a nimbus at the back of her head, and a trailing cloak
+and veil. . . .  Here, after all, is the same sentiment, only
+translated into nineteenth-century language; uses corrogated iron
+sheds, and cups of tea, and oakum matting.  'Mr. Palmer, he bought
+the place,' says the landlady, 'he made it into a Temperance Hotel,
+and built the Temperance Hall in the garden.' . . . .
+
+No romantic marble shrine, but a square meeting-house of good
+intent, a tribute not less sincere because it is square, than if it
+were drawn into Gothic arch and curve.  It speaks, not of a holy and
+mythical saint, but of a good and warm-hearted woman; of a life-long
+penance borne with charity and cheerfulness; of sweet fancies and
+blessings which have given innocent pleasure to many generations!
+
+VII.
+
+There is a note, written in a close and pretty writing, something
+between Sir Walter Scott's and Mrs. Browning's, which the present
+writer has possessed for years, fastened in a book among other early
+treasures:--
+
+Thank you, dearest Miss Priscilla, for your great kindness.  I
+return the ninth volume of [illegible], with the four succeeding
+ones, all that I have; probably all that are yet published.  You
+shall have the rest when I get them.  Tell dear Mr. George (I must
+not call him Vert-Vert) that I have recollected the name of the
+author of the clever novel 'Le Rouge et le Noir' (that is the right
+title of the book, which has nothing to do with the name); the
+author's name is Stendhal, or so he calls himself.  I think that he
+was either a musician or a musical critic, and that he is dead. . .
+.  My visitor has not yet arrived (6 o'clock, p.m.), frightened no
+doubt by the abruptness of the two notes which I wrote in reply to
+hers yesterday morning; and indeed nobody could fancy the hurry in
+which one is forced to write by this walking post. . . .
+
+Tell my visitors of yesterday with my kind love that they did me all
+the good in the world, as indeed everybody of your house does.--
+Ever, dear Miss Priscilla, very affectionately yours,
+                                 M. R. MITFORD.
+
+In the present writer's own early days, when the now owner of
+Swallowfield was a very young, younger son, she used to hear him and
+his sister, Mrs. Brackenbury (the Miss Priscilla of the note),
+speaking with affectionate remembrance of the old friend lately
+gone, who had dwelt at their very gates; through which friendly
+gates one is glad, indeed, to realise what delightful companionship
+and loving help came to cheer the end of that long and toilsome
+life; and when Messrs.  Macmillan suggested this preface the writer
+looked for her old autograph-book, and at its suggestion wrote
+(wondering whether any links existed still) to ask for information
+concerning Miss Mitford, and so it happened that she found herself
+also kindly entertained at Swallowfield, and invited to visit the
+scenes of which the author of 'Our Village' had written with so much
+delight.
+
+I think I should like to reverse the old proverb about letting those
+who run read, my own particular fancy being for reading first and
+running afterwards.  There are few greater pleasures than to meet
+with an Individuality, to listen to it speaking from a printed page,
+recounting, suggesting, growing upon you every hour, gaining in life
+and presence, and then, while still under its influence, to find
+oneself suddenly transported into the very scene of that life, to
+stand among its familiar impressions and experiences, realising
+another distinct existence by some odd metempsychosis, and what may-
+-or rather, what MUST have been.  It is existing a book rather than
+reading it when this happens to one.
+
+The house in Swallowfield Park is an old English country home, a
+fastness still piled up against time; whose stately walls and halls
+within, and beautiful century-old trees in the park without, record
+great times and striking figures.  The manor was a part of the dowry
+of Henry the VIII.'s luckless queens.  The modern house was built by
+Clarendon, and the old church among the elms dates from 1200, with
+carved signs and symbols and brasses of knights and burgesses, and
+names of strange sound and bygone fashion.
+
+Lady Russell, who had sent the phaeton with the fast-stepping horse
+to meet us, was walking in the park as we drove up, and instead of
+taking us back to the house, she first led the way across the grass
+and by the stream to the old church, standing in its trim sweet
+garden, where Death itself seems smiling and fearless; where kind
+Mary Mitford's warm heart rests quiet, and 'her busy hand,' as she
+says herself, 'is lying in peace there, where the sun glances
+through the great elm trees in the beautiful churchyard of
+Swallowfield.'
+
+The last baronet, Sir Charles, who fought in the Crimea, and who
+succeeded his father, Sir Henry, moved the dividing rail so that his
+old friend should be well within the shadow of these elm trees.
+Lady Russell showed us the tranquil green place, and told us its
+story, and how the old church had once been doomed to destruction
+when Kingsley came over by chance, and pleaded that it should be
+spared; and how, when rubbish and outward signs of decay had been
+cleared away, the restorers were rewarded for their piety, by coming
+upon noble beams of oak, untouched by time, upon some fine old
+buried monuments and brasses and inscriptions, among which the
+people still say their prayers in the shrine where their fathers
+knelt, and of which the tradition is not yet swept away.  The
+present Lady of the Manor, who loves old traditions, has done her
+part to preserve the records for her children.
+
+So Miss Mitford walked from Three Mile Cross to Swallowfield to end
+her days, with these kind friends to cheer and to comfort her.  Sir
+Henry Russell was alive when she first established herself, but he
+was already suffering from some sudden seizure, which she, with her
+usual impetuosity, describes in her letters as a chronic state of
+things.  After his death, his widow, the Lady Russell of those days,
+was her kindest friend and comforter.
+
+The little Swallowfield cottage at the meeting of the three roads,
+to which Mary Mitford came when she left Three Mile Cross, has
+thrown out a room or two, as cottages do, but otherwise I think it
+can be little changed.  It was here Miss Mitford was visited by so
+many interesting people, here she used to sit writing at her big
+table under the 'tassels of her acacia tree.'  When the present Lady
+of the Manor brought us to the gate, the acacia flowers were over,
+but a balmy breath of summer was everywhere; a beautiful rose was
+hanging upon the wall beneath the window (it must have taken many
+years to grow to such a height), and beyond the palings of the
+garden spread the fields, ripening in the late July, and turning to
+gold.  The farmer and his son were at work with their scythes; the
+birds were still flying, the sweet scents were in the air.
+
+From a lady who had known her, 'my own Miss Anne' of the letters, we
+heard something more that day of the author of 'Our Village'; of her
+charming intellect, her gift of talk, her impulsiveness, her
+essential sociability, and rapid grace of mind.  She had the faults
+of her qualities; she jumped too easily to conclusions; she was too
+much under the influence of those with whom she lived.  She was born
+to be a victim,--even after her old tyrant father's death, she was
+more or less over-ridden by her servants.  Neighbours looked
+somewhat doubtfully on K. and Ben, but they were good to her, on the
+whole, and tended her carefully.  Miss Russell said that when she
+and her brother took refuge in the cottage, one morning from a
+storm, while they dried themselves by the fire, they saw the careful
+meal carried up to the old lady, the kidneys, the custard, for her
+dejeuner a la fourchette.
+
+When Miss Mitford died, she left everything she had to her beloved
+K. and to Ben, except that she said she wished that one book from
+her well-stocked library should be given to each of her friends.
+The old Doctor, with all his faults, had loved books, and bought
+handsome and valuable first editions of good authors.  K. and Ben
+also seem to have loved books and first editions.  To the Russells,
+who had nursed Miss Mitford, comforted her, by whose gates she
+dwelt, in whose arms she died, Ben brought, as a token of
+remembrance, an old shilling volume of one of G. P. R. James's
+novels, which was all he could bear to part with.  A prettier
+incident was told me by Miss Russell, who once went to visit Miss
+Mitford's grave.  She found a young man standing there whom she did
+not know.  'Don't you know me?' said he; 'I am Henry, ma'am.  I have
+just come back from Australia.'  He was one of the children of the
+couple who had lived in the cottage, and his first visit on his
+return from abroad had been to the tomb of his old protectress.
+
+I also heard a friend who knew Miss Mitford in her latest days,
+describe going to see her within a very few months of her death; she
+was still bright and responding as ever, though very ill.  The young
+visitor had herself been laid up and absent from the invalid's
+bedside for some time.  They talked over many things,--an authoress
+among the rest, concerning whose power of writing a book Miss
+Mitford seems to have been very doubtful.  After her visitor was
+gone, the sick woman wrote one of her delicate pretty little notes
+and despatched it with its tiny seal (there it is still unbroken,
+with its M. R. M. just as she stamped it), and this is the little
+letter:--
+
+Thank you, dearest Miss . . .  for once again showing me your fair
+face by the side of the dear, dear friend [Lady Russell] for whose
+goodness I have neither thanks nor words.  To the end of my life I
+shall go on sinning and repenting.  Heartily sorry have I been ever
+since you went away to have spoken so unkindly to Mrs . . . .
+Heaven forgive me for it, and send her a happier conclusion to her
+life than the beginning might warrant.  If you have an idle lover,
+my dear, present over to him my sermon, for those were words of
+worth.
+
+God bless you all!  Ever, most faithfully and affectionately yours,
+                                                   M. R. MITFORD.
+Sunday Evening.
+
+VIII.
+
+When one turns from Miss Mitford's works to the notices in the
+biographical dictionary (in which Miss Mitford and Mithridates
+occupy the same page), one finds how firmly her reputation is
+established.  'Dame auteur,' says my faithful mentor, the Biographic
+Generale, 'consideree comme le peintre le plus fidele de la vie
+rurale en Angleterre.'  'Author of a remarkable tragedy, "Julian,"
+in which Macready played a principal part, followed by "Foscari,"
+"Rienzi," and others,' says the English Biographical Dictionary.
+
+'I am charmed with my new cottage,' she writes soon after her last
+installation; 'the neighbours are most kind.'  Kingsley was one of
+the first to call upon her.  'He took me quite by surprise in his
+extraordinary fascination,' says the old lady.
+
+Mr. Fields, the American publisher, also went to see Miss Mitford at
+Swallowfield, and immediately became a very great ally of hers.  It
+was to him that she gave her own portrait, by Lucas.  Mr. Fields has
+left an interesting account of her in his 'Yesterdays with Authors'-
+-'Her dogs and her geraniums,' he says, 'were her great glories!
+She used to write me long letters about Fanchon, a dog whose
+personal acquaintance I had made some time before, while on a visit
+to her cottage.  Every virtue under heaven she attributed to that
+canine individual; and I was obliged to allow in my return letters
+that since our planet began to spin, nothing comparable to Fanchon
+had ever run on four legs.  I had also known Flush, the ancestor of
+Fanchon, intimately, and had been accustomed to hear wonderful
+things of that dog, but Fanchon had graces and genius unique.  Miss
+Mitford would have joined with Hamerton, when he says, 'I humbly
+thank Divine Providence for having invented dogs, and I regard that
+man with wondering pity who can lead a dogless life.'
+
+Another of Miss Mitford's great friends was John Ruskin,* and one
+can well imagine how much they must have had in common.  Of Miss
+Mitford's writings Ruskin says, 'They have the playfulness and
+purity of the "Vicar of Wakefield" without the naughtiness of its
+occasional wit, or the dust of the world's great road on the other
+side of the hedge. . . . '
+
+*It is Mr. Harness who says, writing of Ruskin and Miss Mitford,
+'His kindness cheered her closing days.  He sent her every book that
+would interest, every delicacy that would strengthen her.'
+
+Neither the dust nor the ethics of the world of men quite belonged
+to Miss Mitford's genius.  It is always a sort of relief to turn
+from her criticism of people, her praise of Louis Napoleon, her
+facts about Mr. Dickens, whom she describes as a dull companion, or
+about my father, whom she looked upon as an utter heartless
+worldling, to the natural spontaneous sweet flow of nature in which
+she lived and moved instinctively.
+
+Mr. James Payn gives, perhaps, the most charming of all the
+descriptions of the author of 'Our Village.'  He has many letters
+from her to quote from.  'The paper is all odds and ends,' he says,
+'and not a scrap of it but is covered and crossed.  The very flaps
+of the envelopes and the outsides of them have their message.'
+
+Mr. Payn went to see her at Swallowfield, and describes the small
+apartment lined with books from floor to ceiling and fragrant with
+flowers.  'Its tenant rose from her arm-chair with difficulty, but
+with a sunny smile and a charming manner bade me welcome.  My father
+had been an old friend of hers, and she spoke of my home and
+belongings as only a woman can speak of such things, then we plunged
+into medea res, into men and books.  She seemed to me to have known
+everybody worth knowing from the Duke of Wellington to the last new
+verse-maker.  And she talked like an angel, but her views upon
+poetry as a calling in life, shocked me not a little.  She said she
+preferred a mariage de convenance to a love match, because it
+generally turned out better.  "This surprises you," she said,
+smiling, "but then I suppose I am the least romantic person that
+ever wrote plays."  She was much more proud of her plays, even then
+well-nigh forgotten, than of the works by which she was well known,
+and which at that time brought people from the ends of the earth to
+see her. . . .
+
+'Nothing ever destroyed her faith in those she loved.  If I had not
+known all about him from my own folk I should have thought her
+father had been a patriot and a martyr.  She spoke of him as if
+there had never been such a father--which in a sense was true.'
+
+Mr. Payn quotes Miss Mitford's charming description of K., 'for whom
+she had the highest admiration.'  'K. is a great curiosity, by far
+the cleverest woman in these parts, not in a literary way [this was
+not to disappoint me], but in everything that is useful.  She could
+make a Court dress for a duchess or cook a dinner for a Lord Mayor,
+but her principal talent is shown in managing everybody whom she
+comes near.  Especially her husband and myself; she keeps the money
+of both and never allows either of us to spend sixpence without her
+knowledge. . . .  You should see the manner in which she makes Ben
+reckon with her, and her contempt for all women who do not manage
+their husbands.'
+
+Another delightful quotation is from one of Charles Kingsley's
+letters to Mr. Payn.  It brings the past before us from another
+point of view.
+
+'I can never forget the little figure rolled up in two chairs in the
+little Swallowfield room, packed round with books up to the ceiling-
+-the little figure with clothes on of no recognised or recognisable
+pattern; and somewhere, out of the upper end of the heap, gleaming
+under a great deep globular brow, two such eyes as I never perhaps
+saw in any other Englishwoman--though I believe she must have had
+French blood in her veins to breed such eyes and such a tongue, the
+beautiful speech which came out of that ugly (it was that) face, and
+the glitter and depth too of the eyes, like live coals--perfectly
+honest the while. . . .'  One would like to go on quoting and
+copying, but here my preface must cease, for it is but a preface
+after all, one of those many prefaces written out of the past and
+when everything is over.
+
+
+
+COUNTRY PICTURES.
+
+Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me
+most delightful is a little village far in the country; a small
+neighbourhood, not of fine mansions finely peopled, but of cottages
+and cottage-like houses, 'messuages or tenements,' as a friend of
+mine calls such ignoble and nondescript dwellings, with inhabitants
+whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a
+little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an
+ant-hill, or bees in a hive, or sheep in a fold, or nuns in a
+convent, or sailors in a ship; where we know every one, are known to
+every one, interested in every one, and authorised to hope that
+every one feels an interest in us.  How pleasant it is to slide into
+these true-hearted feelings from the kindly and unconscious
+influence of habit, and to learn to know and to love the people
+about us, with all their peculiarities, just as we learn to know and
+to love the nooks and turns of the shady lanes and sunny commons
+that we pass every day.  Even in books I like a confined locality,
+and so do the critics when they talk of the unities.  Nothing is so
+tiresome as to be whirled half over Europe at the chariot-wheels of
+a hero, to go to sleep at Vienna, and awaken at Madrid; it produces
+a real fatigue, a weariness of spirit.  On the other hand, nothing
+is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss
+Austen's delicious novels, quite sure before we leave it to become
+intimate with every spot and every person it contains; or to ramble
+with Mr. White* over his own parish of Selborne, and form a
+friendship with the fields and coppices, as well as with the birds,
+mice, and squirrels, who inhabit them; or to sail with Robinson
+Crusoe to his island, and live there with him and his goats and his
+man Friday;--how much we dread any new comers, any fresh importation
+of savage or sailor! we never sympathise for a moment in our hero's
+want of company, and are quite grieved when he gets away;--or to be
+shipwrecked with Ferdinand on that other lovelier island--the island
+of Prospero, and Miranda, and Caliban, and Ariel, and nobody else,
+none of Dryden's exotic inventions:--that is best of all.  And a
+small neighbourhood is as good in sober waking reality as in poetry
+or prose; a village neighbourhood, such as this Berkshire hamlet in
+which I write, a long, straggling, winding street at the bottom of a
+fine eminence, with a road through it, always abounding in carts,
+horsemen, and carriages, and lately enlivened by a stage-coach from
+B---- to S----, which passed through about ten days ago, and will I
+suppose return some time or other.  There are coaches of all
+varieties nowadays; perhaps this may be intended for a monthly
+diligence, or a fortnight fly.  Will you walk with me through our
+village, courteous reader?  The journey is not long.  We will begin
+at the lower end, and proceed up the hill.
+
+*White's 'Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne;' one of the
+most fascinating books ever written.  I wonder that no naturalist
+has adopted the same plan.
+
+The tidy, square, red cottage on the right hand, with the long
+well-stocked garden by the side of the road, belongs to a retired
+publican from a neighbouring town; a substantial person with a
+comely wife; one who piques himself on independence and idleness,
+talks politics, reads newspapers, hates the minister, and cries out
+for reform.  He introduced into our peaceful vicinage the rebellious
+innovation of an illumination on the Queen's acquittal.
+Remonstrance and persuasion were in vain; he talked of liberty and
+broken windows--so we all lighted up.  Oh! how he shone that night
+with candles, and laurel, and white bows, and gold paper, and a
+transparency (originally designed for a pocket-handkerchief) with a
+flaming portrait of her Majesty, hatted and feathered, in red ochre.
+He had no rival in the village, that we all acknowledged; the very
+bonfire was less splendid; the little boys reserved their best
+crackers to be expended in his honour, and he gave them full
+sixpence more than any one else.  He would like an illumination once
+a month; for it must not be concealed that, in spite of gardening,
+of newspaper reading, of jaunting about in his little cart, and
+frequenting both church and meeting, our worthy neighbour begins to
+feel the weariness of idleness.  He hangs over his gate, and tries
+to entice passengers to stop and chat; he volunteers little jobs all
+round, smokes cherry trees to cure the blight, and traces and blows
+up all the wasps'-nests in the parish.  I have seen a great many
+wasps in our garden to-day, and shall enchant him with the
+intelligence.  He even assists his wife in her sweepings and
+dustings.  Poor man! he is a very respectable person, and would be a
+very happy one, if he would add a little employment to his dignity.
+It would be the salt of life to him.
+
+Next to his house, though parted from it by another long garden with
+a yew arbour at the end, is the pretty dwelling of the shoemaker, a
+pale, sickly-looking, black-haired man, the very model of sober
+industry.  There he sits in his little shop from early morning till
+late at night.  An earthquake would hardly stir him:  the
+illumination did not.  He stuck immovably to his last, from the
+first lighting up, through the long blaze and the slow decay, till
+his large solitary candle was the only light in the place.  One
+cannot conceive anything more perfect than the contempt which the
+man of transparencies and the man of shoes must have felt for each
+other on that evening.  There was at least as much vanity in the
+sturdy industry as in the strenuous idleness, for our shoemaker is a
+man of substance; he employs three journeymen, two lame, and one a
+dwarf, so that his shop looks like an hospital; he has purchased the
+lease of his commodious dwelling, some even say that he has bought
+it out and out; and he has only one pretty daughter, a light,
+delicate, fair-haired girl of fourteen, the champion, protectress,
+and playfellow of every brat under three years old, whom she jumps,
+dances, dandles, and feeds all day long.  A very attractive person
+is that child-loving girl.  I have never seen any one in her station
+who possessed so thoroughly that undefinable charm, the lady-look.
+See her on a Sunday in her simplicity and her white frock, and she
+might pass for an earl's daughter.  She likes flowers too, and has a
+profusion of white stocks under her window, as pure and delicate as
+herself.
+
+The first house on the opposite side of the way is the blacksmith's;
+a gloomy dwelling, where the sun never seems to shine; dark and
+smoky within and without, like a forge.  The blacksmith is a high
+officer in our little state, nothing less than a constable; but,
+alas! alas! when tumults arise, and the constable is called for, he
+will commonly be found in the thickest of the fray. Lucky would it
+be for his wife and her eight children if there were no public-house
+in the land:  an inveterate inclination to enter those bewitching
+doors is Mr. Constable's only fault.
+
+Next to this official dwelling is a spruce brick tenement, red,
+high, and narrow, boasting, one above another, three sash-windows,
+the only sash-windows in the village, with a clematis on one side
+and a rose on the other, tall and narrow like itself.  That slender
+mansion has a fine, genteel look.  The little parlour seems made for
+Hogarth's old maid and her stunted footboy; for tea and card
+parties,--it would just hold one table; for the rustle of faded
+silks, and the splendour of old china; for the delight of four by
+honours, and a little snug, quiet scandal between the deals; for
+affected gentility and real starvation.  This should have been its
+destiny; but fate has been unpropitious:  it belongs to a plump,
+merry, bustling dame, with four fat, rosy, noisy children, the very
+essence of vulgarity and plenty.
+
+Then comes the village shop, like other village shops, multifarious
+as a bazaar; a repository for bread, shoes, tea, cheese, tape,
+ribands, and bacon; for everything, in short, except the one
+particular thing which you happen to want at the moment, and will be
+sure not to find.  The people are civil and thriving, and frugal
+withal; they have let the upper part of their house to two young
+women (one of them is a pretty blue-eyed girl) who teach little
+children their A B C, and make caps and gowns for their mammas,--
+parcel schoolmistress, parcel mantua-maker.  I believe they find
+adorning the body a more profitable vocation than adorning the mind.
+
+Divided from the shop by a narrow yard, and opposite the
+shoemaker's, is a habitation of whose inmates I shall say nothing.
+A cottage--no--a miniature house, with many additions, little odds
+and ends of places, pantries, and what not; all angles, and of a
+charming in-and-outness; a little bricked court before one half, and
+a little flower-yard before the other; the walls, old and
+weather-stained, covered with hollyhocks, roses, honeysuckles, and a
+great apricot-tree; the casements full of geraniums (ah! there is
+our superb white cat peeping out from among them); the closets (our
+landlord has the assurance to call them rooms) full of contrivances
+and corner-cupboards; and the little garden behind full of common
+flowers, tulips, pinks, larkspurs, peonies, stocks, and carnations,
+with an arbour of privet, not unlike a sentry-box, where one lives
+in a delicious green light, and looks out on the gayest of all gay
+flower-beds.  That house was built on purpose to show in what an
+exceeding small compass comfort may be packed.  Well, I will loiter
+there no longer.
+
+The next tenement is a place of importance, the Rose Inn:  a
+white-washed building, retired from the road behind its fine
+swinging sign, with a little bow-window room coming out on one side,
+and forming, with our stable on the other, a sort of open square,
+which is the constant resort of carts, waggons, and return chaises.
+There are two carts there now, and mine host is serving them with
+beer in his eternal red waistcoat.  He is a thriving man and a
+portly, as his waistcoat attests, which has been twice let out
+within this twelvemonth.  Our landlord has a stirring wife, a
+hopeful son, and a daughter, the belle of the village; not so pretty
+as the fair nymph of the shoe-shop, and far less elegant, but ten
+times as fine; all curl-papers in the morning, like a porcupine, all
+curls in the afternoon, like a poodle, with more flounces than
+curl-papers, and more lovers than curls.  Miss Phoebe is fitter for
+town than country; and to do her justice, she has a consciousness of
+that fitness, and turns her steps townward as often as she can.  She
+is gone to B---- to-day with her last and principal lover, a
+recruiting sergeant--a man as tall as Sergeant Kite, and as
+impudent.  Some day or other he will carry off Miss Phoebe.
+
+In a line with the bow-window room is a low garden-wall, belonging
+to a house under repair:--the white house opposite the
+collar-maker's shop, with four lime-trees before it, and a
+waggon-load of bricks at the door.  That house is the plaything of a
+wealthy, well-meaning, whimsical person who lives about a mile off.
+He has a passion for brick and mortar, and, being too wise to meddle
+with his own residence, diverts himself with altering and
+re-altering, improving and re-improving, doing and undoing here.  It
+is a perfect Penelope's web.  Carpenters and bricklayers have been
+at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and
+wonder whether anything has really been done.  One exploit in last
+June was, however, by no means equivocal.  Our good neighbour
+fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there
+was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the
+leaves stripped from every tree.  There they stood, poor miserable
+skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the glowing midsummer sun.
+Nature revenged herself, in her own sweet and gracious manner; fresh
+leaves sprang out, and at nearly Christmas the foliage was as
+brilliant as when the outrage was committed.
+
+Next door lives a carpenter, 'famed ten miles round, and worthy all
+his fame,'--few cabinet-makers surpass him, with his excellent wife,
+and their little daughter Lizzy, the plaything and queen of the
+village, a child three years old according to the register, but six
+in size and strength and intellect, in power and in self-will.  She
+manages everybody in the place, her schoolmistress included; turns
+the wheeler's children out of their own little cart, and makes them
+draw her; seduces cakes and lollypops from the very shop window;
+makes the lazy carry her, the silent talk to her, the grave romp
+with her; does anything she pleases; is absolutely irresistible.
+Her chief attraction lies in her exceeding power of loving, and her
+firm reliance on the love and indulgence of others.  How impossible
+it would be to disappoint the dear little girl when she runs to meet
+you, slides her pretty hand into yours, looks up gladly in your
+face, and says 'Come!'  You must go:  you cannot help it.  Another
+part of her charm is her singular beauty.  Together with a good deal
+of the character of Napoleon, she has something of his square,
+sturdy, upright form, with the finest limbs in the world, a
+complexion purely English, a round laughing face, sunburnt and rosy,
+large merry blue eyes, curling brown hair, and a wonderful play of
+countenance.  She has the imperial attitudes too, and loves to stand
+with her hands behind her, or folded over her bosom; and sometimes,
+when she has a little touch of shyness, she clasps them together on
+the top of her head, pressing down her shining curls, and looking so
+exquisitely pretty!  Yes, Lizzy is queen of the village!  She has
+but one rival in her dominions, a certain white greyhound called
+Mayflower, much her friend, who resembles her in beauty and
+strength, in playfulness, and almost in sagacity, and reigns over
+the animal world as she over the human.  They are both coming with
+me, Lizzy and Lizzy's 'pretty May.'  We are now at the end of the
+street; a cross-lane, a rope-walk shaded with limes and oaks, and a
+cool clear pond overhung with elms, lead us to the bottom of the
+hill.  There is still one house round the corner, ending in a
+picturesque wheeler's shop.  The dwelling-house is more ambitious.
+Look at the fine flowered window-blinds, the green door with the
+brass knocker, and the somewhat prim but very civil person, who is
+sending off a labouring man with sirs and curtsies enough for a
+prince of the blood.  Those are the curate's lodgings--apartments
+his landlady would call them; he lives with his own family four
+miles off, but once or twice a week he comes to his neat little
+parlour to write sermons, to marry, or to bury, as the case may
+require.  Never were better or kinder people than his host and
+hostess; and there is a reflection of clerical importance about them
+since their connection with the Church, which is quite edifying--a
+decorum, a gravity, a solemn politeness.  Oh, to see the worthy
+wheeler carry the gown after his lodger on a Sunday, nicely pinned
+up in his wife's best handkerchief!--or to hear him rebuke a
+squalling child or a squabbling woman!  The curate is nothing to
+him.  He is fit to be perpetual churchwarden.
+
+We must now cross the lane into the shady rope-walk.  That pretty
+white cottage opposite, which stands straggling at the end of the
+village in a garden full of flowers, belongs to our mason, the
+shortest of men, and his handsome, tall wife:  he, a dwarf, with the
+voice of a giant; one starts when he begins to talk as if he were
+shouting through a speaking trumpet; she, the sister, daughter, and
+grand-daughter, of a long line of gardeners, and no contemptible one
+herself.  It is very magnanimous in me not to hate her; for she
+beats me in my own way, in chrysanthemums, and dahlias, and the like
+gauds.  Her plants are sure to live; mine have a sad trick of dying,
+perhaps because I love them, 'not wisely, but too well,' and kill
+them with over-kindness.  Half-way up the hill is another detached
+cottage, the residence of an officer, and his beautiful family.
+That eldest boy, who is hanging over the gate, and looking with such
+intense childish admiration at my Lizzy, might be a model for a
+Cupid.
+
+How pleasantly the road winds up the hill, with its broad green
+borders and hedgerows so thickly timbered!  How finely the evening
+sun falls on that sandy excavated bank, and touches the farmhouse on
+the top of the eminence! and how clearly defined and relieved is the
+figure of the man who is just coming
+down!  It is poor John Evans, the gardener--an excellent gardener
+till about ten years ago, when he lost his wife, and became insane.
+He was sent to St. Luke's, and dismissed as cured; but his power was
+gone and his strength; he could no longer manage a garden, nor
+submit to the restraint, nor encounter the fatigue of regular
+employment:  so he retreated to the workhouse, the pensioner and
+factotum of the village, amongst whom he divides his services.  His
+mind often wanders, intent on some fantastic and impracticable plan,
+and lost to present objects; but he is perfectly harmless, and full
+of a childlike simplicity, a smiling contentedness, a most touching
+gratitude.  Every one is kind to John Evans, for there is that about
+him which must be loved; and his unprotectedness, his utter
+defencelessness, have an irresistible claim on every better feeling.
+I know nobody who inspires so deep and tender a pity; he improves
+all around him.  He is useful, too, to the extent of his little
+power; will do anything, but loves gardening best, and still piques
+himself on his old arts of pruning fruit-trees, and raising
+cucumbers.  He is the happiest of men just now, for he has the
+management of a melon bed--a melon bed!--fie!  What a grand pompous
+name was that for three melon plants under a hand-light!  John Evans
+is sure that they will succeed.  We shall see:  as the chancellor
+said, 'I doubt.'
+
+We are now on the very brow of the eminence, close to the Hill-house
+and its beautiful garden.  On the outer edge of the paling, hanging
+over the bank that skirts the road, is an old thorn--such a thorn!
+The long sprays covered with snowy blossoms, so graceful, so
+elegant, so lightsome, and yet so rich!  There only wants a pool
+under the thorn to give a still lovelier reflection, quivering and
+trembling, like a tuft of feathers, whiter and greener than the
+life, and more prettily mixed with the bright blue sky.  There
+should indeed be a pool; but on the dark grass-plat, under the high
+bank, which is crowned by that magnificent plume, there is something
+that does almost as well,--Lizzy and Mayflower in the midst of a
+game at romps, 'making a sunshine in the shady place;' Lizzy
+rolling, laughing, clapping her hands, and glowing like a rose;
+Mayflower playing about her like summer lightning, dazzling the eyes
+with her sudden turns, her leaps, her bounds, her attacks, and her
+escapes.  She darts round the lovely little girl, with the same
+momentary touch that the swallow skims over the water, and has
+exactly the same power of flight, the same matchless ease and
+strength and grace.  What a pretty picture they would make; what a
+pretty foreground they do make to the real landscape!  The road
+winding down the hill with a slight bend, like that in the High
+Street at Oxford; a waggon slowly ascending, and a horseman passing
+it at a full trot--(ah! Lizzy, Mayflower will certainly desert you
+to have a gambol with that blood-horse!) half-way down, just at the
+turn, the red cottage of the lieutenant, covered with vines, the
+very image of comfort and content; farther down, on the opposite
+side, the small white dwelling of the little mason; then the limes
+and the rope-walk; then the village street, peeping through the
+trees, whose clustering tops hide all but the chimneys, and various
+roofs of the houses, and here and there some angle of a wall;
+farther on, the elegant town of B----, with its fine old
+church-towers and spires; the whole view shut in by a range of
+chalky hills and over every part of the picture, trees so profusely
+scattered, that it appears like a woodland scene, with glades and
+villages intermixed.  The trees are of all kinds and all hues,
+chiefly the finely-shaped elm, of so bright and deep a green, the
+tips of whose high outer branches drop down with such a crisp and
+garland-like richness, and the oak, whose stately form is just now
+so splendidly adorned by the sunny colouring of the young leaves.
+Turning again up the hill, we find ourselves on that peculiar charm
+of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right
+side fringed by hedgerows and trees, with cottages and farmhouses
+irregularly placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks;
+the left, prettier still, dappled by bright pools of water, and
+islands of cottages and cottage-gardens, and sinking gradually down
+to cornfields and meadows, and an old farmhouse, with pointed roofs
+and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and
+backed by woody hills.  The common is itself the prettiest part of
+the prospect; half covered with low furze, whose golden blossoms
+reflect so intensely the last beams of the setting sun, and alive
+with cows and sheep, and two sets of cricketers; one of young men,
+surrounded by spectators, some standing, some sitting, some
+stretched on the grass, all taking a delighted interest in the game;
+the other, a merry group of little boys, at a humble distance, for
+whom even cricket is scarcely lively enough, shouting, leaping, and
+enjoying themselves to their hearts' content.  But cricketers and
+country boys are too important persons in our village to be talked
+of merely as figures in the landscape.  They deserve an individual
+introduction--an essay to themselves--and they shall have it.  No
+fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks
+every day.
+
+
+
+WALKS IN THE COUNTRY.
+
+Frost.
+
+January 23rd.--At noon to-day I and my white greyhound, Mayflower,
+set out for a walk into a very beautiful world,--a sort of silent
+fairyland,--a creation of that matchless magician the hoar-frost.
+There had been just snow enough to cover the earth and all its
+covers with one sheet of pure and uniform white, and just time
+enough since the snow had fallen to allow the hedges to be freed of
+their fleecy load, and clothed with a delicate coating of rime.  The
+atmosphere was deliciously calm; soft, even mild, in spite of the
+thermometer; no perceptible air, but a stillness that might almost
+be felt, the sky, rather gray than blue, throwing out in bold relief
+the snow-covered roofs of our village, and the rimy trees that rise
+above them, and the sun shining dimly as through a veil, giving a
+pale fair light, like the moon, only brighter.  There was a silence,
+too, that might become the moon, as we stood at our little gate
+looking up the quiet street; a Sabbath-like pause of work and play,
+rare on a work-day; nothing was audible but the pleasant hum of
+frost, that low monotonous sound, which is perhaps the nearest
+approach that life and nature can make to absolute silence.  The
+very waggons as they come down the hill along the beaten track of
+crisp yellowish frost-dust, glide along like shadows; even May's
+bounding footsteps, at her height of glee and of speed, fall like
+snow upon snow.
+
+But we shall have noise enough presently:  May has stopped at
+Lizzy's door; and Lizzy, as she sat on the window-sill with her
+bright rosy face laughing through the casement, has seen her and
+disappeared.  She is coming.  No!  The key is turning in the door,
+and sounds of evil omen issue through the keyhole--sturdy 'let me
+outs,' and 'I will goes,' mixed with shrill cries on May and on me
+from Lizzy, piercing through a low continuous harangue, of which the
+prominent parts are apologies, chilblains, sliding, broken bones,
+lollypops, rods, and gingerbread, from Lizzy's careful mother.
+'Don't scratch the door, May!  Don't roar so, my Lizzy!  We'll call
+for you as we come back.'  'I'll go now!  Let me out!  I will go!'
+are the last words of Miss Lizzy.  Mem.  Not to spoil that child--if
+I can help it.  But I do think her mother might have let the poor
+little soul walk with us to-day.  Nothing worse for children than
+coddling.  Nothing better for chilblains than exercise.  Besides, I
+don't believe she has any--and as to breaking her bones in sliding,
+I don't suppose there's a slide on the common.  These murmuring
+cogitations have brought us up the hill, and half-way across the
+light and airy common, with its bright expanse of snow and its
+clusters of cottages, whose turf fires send such wreaths of smoke
+sailing up the air, and diffuse such aromatic fragrance around.  And
+now comes the delightful sound of childish voices, ringing with glee
+and merriment almost from beneath our feet.  Ah, Lizzy, your mother
+was right!  They are shouting from that deep irregular pool, all
+glass now, where, on two long, smooth, liny slides, half a dozen
+ragged urchins are slipping along in tottering triumph.  Half a
+dozen steps bring us to the bank right above them.  May can hardly
+resist the temptation of joining her friends, for most of the
+varlets are of her acquaintance, especially the rogue who leads the
+slide,--he with the brimless hat, whose bronzed complexion and white
+flaxen hair, reversing the usual lights and shadows of the human
+countenance, give so strange and foreign a look to his flat and
+comic features.  This hobgoblin, Jack Rapley by name, is May's great
+crony; and she stands on the brink of the steep, irregular descent,
+her black eyes fixed full upon him, as if she intended him the
+favour of jumping on his head.  She does:  she is down, and upon
+him; but Jack Rapley is not easily to be knocked off his feet.  He
+saw her coming, and in the moment of her leap sprung dexterously off
+the slide on the rough ice, steadying himself by the shoulder of the
+next in the file, which unlucky follower, thus unexpectedly checked
+in his career, fell plump backwards, knocking down the rest of the
+line like a nest of card-houses.  There is no harm done; but there
+they lie, roaring, kicking, sprawling, in every attitude of comic
+distress, whilst Jack Rapley and Mayflower, sole authors of this
+calamity, stand apart from the throng, fondling, and coquetting, and
+complimenting each other, and very visibly laughing, May in her
+black eyes, Jack in his wide, close-shut mouth, and his whole
+monkey-face, at their comrades' mischances.  I think, Miss May, you
+may as well come up again, and leave Master Rapley to fight your
+battles.  He'll get out of the scrape.  He is a rustic wit--a sort
+of Robin Goodfellow--the sauciest, idlest, cleverest, best-natured
+boy in the parish; always foremost in mischief, and always ready to
+do a good turn.  The sages of our village predict sad things of Jack
+Rapley, so that I am sometimes a little ashamed to confess, before
+wise people, that I have a lurking predilection for him (in common
+with other naughty ones), and that I like to hear him talk to May
+almost as well as she does.  'Come, May!' and up she springs, as
+light as a bird.  The road is gay now; carts and post-chaises, and
+girls in red cloaks, and, afar off, looking almost like a toy, the
+coach.  It meets us fast and soon.  How much happier the walkers
+look than the riders--especially the frost-bitten gentleman, and the
+shivering lady with the invisible face, sole passengers of that
+commodious machine!  Hooded, veiled, and bonneted, as she is, one
+sees from her attitude how miserable she would look uncovered.
+
+Another pond, and another noise of children.  More sliding?  Oh no!
+This is a sport of higher pretension.  Our good neighbour, the
+lieutenant, skating, and his own pretty little boys, and two or
+three other four-year-old elves, standing on the brink in an ecstasy
+of joy and wonder!  Oh what happy spectators!  And what a happy
+performer!  They admiring, he admired, with an ardour and sincerity
+never excited by all the quadrilles and the spread-eagles of the
+Seine and the Serpentine.  He really skates well though, and I am
+glad I came this way; for, with all the father's feelings sitting
+gaily at his heart, it must still gratify the pride of skill to have
+one spectator at that solitary pond who has seen skating before.
+
+Now we have reached the trees,--the beautiful trees! never so
+beautiful as to-day.  Imagine the effect of a straight and regular
+double avenue of oaks, nearly a mile long, arching overhead, and
+closing into perspective like the roof and columns of a cathedral,
+every tree and branch incrusted with the bright and delicate
+congelation of hoar-frost, white and pure as snow, delicate and
+defined as carved ivory.  How beautiful it is, how uniform, how
+various, how filling, how satiating to the eye and to the mind--
+above all, how melancholy!  There is a thrilling awfulness, an
+intense feeling of simple power in that naked and colourless beauty,
+which falls on the earth like the thoughts of death--death pure, and
+glorious, and smiling,--but still death.  Sculpture has always the
+same effect on my imagination, and painting never.  Colour is life.-
+-We are now at the end of this magnificent avenue, and at the top of
+a steep eminence commanding a wide view over four counties--a
+landscape of snow.  A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere
+narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and
+furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous
+for their summer smell of thyme.  How lovely these banks are now--
+the tall weeds and the gorse fixed and stiffened in the hoar-frost,
+which fringes round the bright prickly holly, the pendent foliage of
+the bramble, and the deep orange leaves of the pollard oaks!  Oh,
+this is rime in its loveliest form!  And there is still a berry here
+and there on the holly, 'blushing in its natural coral' through the
+delicate tracery, still a stray hip or haw for the birds, who abound
+here always.  The poor birds, how tame they are, how sadly tame!
+There is the beautiful and rare crested wren, 'that shadow of a
+bird,' as White of Selborne calls it, perched in the middle of the
+hedge, nestling as it were amongst the cold bare boughs, seeking,
+poor pretty thing, for the warmth it will not find.  And there,
+farther on, just under the bank, by the slender runlet, which still
+trickles between its transparent fantastic margin of thin ice, as if
+it were a thing of life,--there, with a swift, scudding motion,
+flits, in short low flights, the gorgeous kingfisher, its
+magnificent plumage of scarlet and blue flashing in the sun, like
+the glories of some tropical bird.  He is come for water to this
+little spring by the hillside,--water which even his long bill and
+slender head can hardly reach, so nearly do the fantastic forms of
+those garland-like icy margins meet over the tiny stream beneath.
+It is rarely that one sees the shy beauty so close or so long; and
+it is pleasant to see him in the grace and beauty of his natural
+liberty, the only way to look at a bird.  We used, before we lived
+in a street, to fix a little board outside the parlour window, and
+cover it with bread crumbs in the hard weather.  It was quite
+delightful to see the pretty things come and feed, to conquer their
+shyness, and do away their mistrust.  First came the more social
+tribes, 'the robin red-breast and the wren,' cautiously,
+suspiciously, picking up a crumb on the wing, with the little keen
+bright eye fixed on the window; then they would stop for two pecks;
+then stay till they were satisfied.  The shyer birds, tamed by their
+example, came next; and at last one saucy fellow of a blackbird--a
+sad glutton, he would clear the board in two minutes,--used to tap
+his yellow bill against the window for more.  How we loved the
+fearless confidence of that fine, frank-hearted creature!  And
+surely he loved us.  I wonder the practice is not more general.
+'May!  May! naughty May!'  She has frightened away the kingfisher;
+and now, in her coaxing penitence, she is covering me with snow.
+'Come, pretty May! it is time to go home.'
+
+Thaw.
+
+January 28th.--We have had rain, and snow, and frost, and rain again
+four days of absolute confinement.  Now it is a thaw and a flood;
+but our light gravelly soil, and country boots, and country
+hardihood, will carry us through.  What a dripping, comfortless day
+it is! just like the last days of November:  no sun, no sky, gray or
+blue; one low, overhanging, dark, dismal cloud, like London smoke;
+Mayflower is out coursing too, and Lizzy gone to school.  Never
+mind.  Up the hill again!  Walk we must.  Oh what a watery world to
+look back upon!  Thames, Kennet, Loddon--all overflowed; our famous
+town, inland once, turned into a sort of Venice; C. park converted
+into an island; and the long range of meadows from B. to W. one huge
+unnatural lake, with trees growing out of it.  Oh what a watery
+world!--I will look at it no longer.  I will walk on.  The road is
+alive again.  Noise is reborn.  Waggons creak, horses splash, carts
+rattle, and pattens paddle through the dirt with more than their
+usual clink.  The common has its old fine tints of green and brown,
+and its old variety of inhabitants, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and
+donkeys.  The ponds are unfrozen, except where some melancholy piece
+of melting ice floats sullenly on the water; and cackling geese and
+gabbling ducks have replaced the lieutenant and Jack Rapley.  The
+avenue is chill and dark, the hedges are dripping, the lanes
+knee-deep, and all nature is in a state of 'dissolution and thaw.'
+
+
+
+THE FIRST PRIMROSE.
+
+March 6th.--Fine March weather:  boisterous, blustering, much wind
+and squalls of rain; and yet the sky, where the clouds are swept
+away, deliciously blue, with snatches of sunshine, bright, and
+clear, and healthful, and the roads, in spite of the slight
+glittering showers, crisply dry.  Altogether the day is tempting,
+very tempting.  It will not do for the dear common, that windmill of
+a walk; but the close sheltered lanes at the bottom of the hill,
+which keep out just enough of the stormy air, and let in all the
+sun, will be delightful.  Past our old house, and round by the
+winding lanes, and the workhouse, and across the lea, and so into
+the turnpike-road again,--that is our route for to-day.  Forth we
+set, Mayflower and I, rejoicing in the sunshine, and still more in
+the wind, which gives such an intense feeling of existence, and,
+co-operating with brisk motion, sets our blood and our spirits in a
+glow.  For mere physical pleasure, there is nothing perhaps equal to
+the enjoyment of being drawn, in a light carriage, against such a
+wind as this, by a blood-horse at his height of speed.  Walking
+comes next to it; but walking is not quite so luxurious or so
+spiritual, not quite so much what one fancies of flying, or being
+carried above the clouds in a balloon.
+
+Nevertheless, a walk is a good thing; especially under this southern
+hedgerow, where nature is just beginning to live again; the
+periwinkles, with their starry blue flowers, and their shining
+myrtle-like leaves, garlanding the bushes; woodbines and elder-trees
+pushing out their small swelling buds; and grasses and mosses
+springing forth in every variety of brown and green.  Here we are at
+the corner where four lanes meet, or rather where a passable road of
+stones and gravel crosses an impassable one of beautiful but
+treacherous turf, and where the small white farmhouse, scarcely
+larger than a cottage, and the well-stocked rick-yard behind, tell
+of comfort and order, but leave all unguessed the great riches of
+the master.  How he became so rich is almost a puzzle; for, though
+the farm be his own, it is not large; and though prudent and frugal
+on ordinary occasions, Farmer Barnard is no miser.  His horses,
+dogs, and pigs are the best kept in the parish,--May herself,
+although her beauty be injured by her fatness, half envies the
+plight of his bitch Fly:  his wife's gowns and shawls cost as much
+again as any shawls or gowns in the village; his dinner parties (to
+be sure they are not frequent) display twice the ordinary quantity
+of good things--two couples of ducks, two dishes of green peas, two
+turkey poults, two gammons of bacon, two plum-puddings; moreover, he
+keeps a single-horse chaise, and has built and endowed a Methodist
+chapel.  Yet is he the richest man in these parts.  Everything
+prospers with him.  Money drifts about him like snow.  He looks like
+a rich man.  There is a sturdy squareness of face and figure; a
+good-humoured obstinacy; a civil importance.  He never boasts of his
+wealth, or gives himself undue airs; but nobody can meet him at
+market or vestry without finding out immediately that he is the
+richest man there.  They have no child to all this money; but there
+is an adopted nephew, a fine spirited lad, who may, perhaps, some
+day or other, play the part of a fountain to the reservoir.
+
+Now turn up the wide road till we come to the open common, with its
+park-like trees, its beautiful stream, wandering and twisting along,
+and its rural bridge.  Here we turn again, past that other white
+farmhouse, half hidden by the magnificent elms which stand before
+it.  Ah! riches dwell not there, but there is found the next best
+thing--an industrious and light-hearted poverty.  Twenty years ago
+Rachel Hilton was the prettiest and merriest lass in the country.
+Her father, an old gamekeeper, had retired to a village alehouse,
+where his good beer, his social humour, and his black-eyed daughter,
+brought much custom.  She had lovers by the score; but Joseph White,
+the dashing and lively son of an opulent farmer, carried off the
+fair Rachel.  They married and settled here, and here they live
+still, as merrily as ever, with fourteen children of all ages and
+sizes, from nineteen years to nineteen months, working harder than
+any people in the parish, and enjoying themselves more.  I would
+match them for labour and laughter against any family in England.
+She is a blithe, jolly dame, whose beauty has amplified into
+comeliness; he is tall, and thin, and bony, with sinews like
+whipcord, a strong lively voice, a sharp weather-beaten face, and
+eyes and lips that smile and brighten when he speaks into a most
+contagious hilarity.  They are very poor, and I often wish them
+richer; but I don't know--perhaps it might put them out.
+
+Quite close to Farmer White's is a little ruinous cottage,
+white-washed once, and now in a sad state of betweenity, where
+dangling stockings and shirts, swelled by the wind, drying in a
+neglected garden, give signal of a washerwoman.  There dwells, at
+present in single blessedness, Betty Adams, the wife of our
+sometimes gardener.  I never saw any one who so much reminded me in
+person of that lady whom everybody knows, Mistress Meg Merrilies;--
+as tall, as grizzled, as stately, as dark, as gipsy-looking,
+bonneted and gowned like her prototype, and almost as oracular.
+Here the resemblance ceases.  Mrs. Adams is a perfectly honest,
+industrious, painstaking person, who earns a good deal of money by
+washing and charing, and spends it in other luxuries than tidiness,-
+-in green tea, and gin, and snuff.  Her husband lives in a great
+family, ten miles off.  He is a capital gardener--or rather he would
+be so, if he were not too ambitious.  He undertakes all things, and
+finishes none.  But a smooth tongue, a knowing look, and a great
+capacity of labour, carry him through.  Let him but like his ale and
+his master and he will do work enough for four.  Give him his own
+way, and his full quantum, and nothing comes amiss to him.
+
+Ah, May is bounding forward!  Her silly heart leaps at the sight of
+the old place--and so in good truth does mine.  What a pretty place
+it was--or rather, how pretty I thought it!  I suppose I should have
+thought any place so where I had spent eighteen happy years.  But it
+was really pretty.  A large, heavy, white house, in the simplest
+style, surrounded by fine oaks and elms, and tall massy plantations
+shaded down into a beautiful lawn by wild overgrown shrubs, bowery
+acacias, ragged sweet-briers, promontories of dogwood, and Portugal
+laurel, and bays, over-hung by laburnum and bird-cherry; a long
+piece of water letting light into the picture, and looking just like
+a natural stream, the banks as rude and wild as the shrubbery,
+interspersed with broom, and furze, and bramble, and pollard oaks
+covered with ivy and honeysuckle; the whole enclosed by an old mossy
+park paling, and terminating in a series of rich meadows, richly
+planted.  This is an exact description of the home which, three
+years ago, it nearly broke my heart to leave.  What a tearing up by
+the root it was!  I have pitied cabbage-plants and celery, and all
+transplantable things, ever since; though, in common with them, and
+with other vegetables, the first agony of the transportation being
+over, I have taken such firm and tenacious hold of my new soil, that
+I would not for the world be pulled up again, even to be restored to
+the old beloved ground;--not even if its beauty were undiminished,
+which is by no means the case; for in those three years it has
+thrice changed masters, and every successive possessor has brought
+the curse of improvement upon the place; so that between filling up
+the water to cure dampness, cutting down trees to let in prospects,
+planting to keep them out, shutting up windows to darken the inside
+of the house (by which means one end looks precisely as an eight of
+spades would do that should have the misfortune to lose one of his
+corner pips), and building colonnades to lighten the out, added to a
+general clearance of pollards, and brambles, and ivy, and
+honeysuckles, and park palings, and irregular shrubs, the poor place
+is so transmogrified, that if it had its old looking-glass, the
+water, back again, it would not know its own face.  And yet I love
+to haunt round about it:  so does May.  Her particular attraction is
+a certain broken bank full of rabbit burrows, into which she
+insinuates her long pliant head and neck, and tears her pretty feet
+by vain scratchings:  mine is a warm sunny hedgerow, in the same
+remote field, famous for early flowers.  Never was a spot more
+variously flowery:  primroses yellow, lilac white, violets of either
+hue, cowslips, oxslips, arums, orchises, wild hyacinths, ground ivy,
+pansies, strawberries, heart's-ease, formed a small part of the
+Flora of that wild hedgerow.  How profusely they covered the sunny
+open slope under the weeping birch, 'the lady of the woods'--and how
+often have I started to see the early innocent brown snake, who
+loved the spot as well as I did, winding along the young blossoms,
+or rustling amongst the fallen leaves!  There are primrose leaves
+already, and short green buds, but no flowers; not even in that
+furze cradle so full of roots, where they used to blow as in a
+basket.  No, my May, no rabbits! no primroses!  We may as well get
+over the gate into the woody winding lane, which will bring us home
+again.
+
+Here we are making the best of our way between the old elms that
+arch so solemnly over head, dark and sheltered even now.  They say
+that a spirit haunts this deep pool--a white lady without a head.  I
+cannot say that I have seen her, often as I have paced this lane at
+deep midnight, to hear the nightingales, and look at the
+glow-worms;--but there, better and rarer than a thousand ghosts,
+dearer even than nightingales or glow-worms, there is a primrose,
+the first of the year; a tuft of primroses, springing in yonder
+sheltered nook, from the mossy roots of an old willow, and living
+again in the clear bright pool.  Oh, how beautiful they are--three
+fully blown, and two bursting buds!  How glad I am I came this way!
+They are not to be reached.  Even Jack Rapley's love of the
+difficult and the unattainable would fail him here:  May herself
+could not stand on that steep bank.  So much the better.  Who would
+wish to disturb them?  There they live in their innocent and
+fragrant beauty, sheltered from the storms, and rejoicing in the
+sunshine, and looking as if they could feel their happiness.  Who
+would disturb them?  Oh, how glad I am I came this way home!
+
+
+VIOLETING.
+
+March 27th.--It is a dull gray morning, with a dewy feeling in the
+air; fresh, but not windy; cool, but not cold;--the very day for a
+person newly arrived from the heat, the glare, the noise, and the
+fever of London, to plunge into the remotest labyrinths of the
+country, and regain the repose of mind, the calmness of heart, which
+has been lost in that great Babel.  I must go violeting--it is a
+necessity--and I must go alone:  the sound of a voice, even my
+Lizzy's, the touch of Mayflower's head, even the bounding of her
+elastic foot, would disturb the serenity of feeling which I am
+trying to recover.  I shall go quite alone, with my little basket,
+twisted like a bee-hive, which I love so well, because SHE gave it
+to me, and kept sacred to violets and to those whom I love; and I
+shall get out of the high-road the moment I can.  I would not meet
+any one just now, even of those whom I best like to meet.
+
+Ha!--Is not that group--a gentleman on a blood-horse, a lady keeping
+pace with him so gracefully and easily--see how prettily her veil
+waves in the wind created by her own rapid motion!--and that gay,
+gallant boy, on the gallant white Arabian, curveting at their side,
+but ready to spring before them every instant--is not that
+chivalrous-looking party Mr. and Mrs. M. and dear R?  No! the
+servant is in a different livery.  It is some of the ducal family,
+and one of their young Etonians.  I may go on.  I shall meet no one
+now; for I have fairly left the road, and am crossing the lea by one
+of those wandering paths, amidst the gorse, and the heath, and the
+low broom, which the sheep and lambs have made--a path turfy,
+elastic, thymy, and sweet, even at this season.
+
+We have the good fortune to live in an unenclosed parish, and may
+thank the wise obstinacy of two or three sturdy farmers, and the
+lucky unpopularity of a ranting madcap lord of the manor, for
+preserving the delicious green patches, the islets of wilderness
+amidst cultivation, which form, perhaps, the peculiar beauty of
+English scenery.  The common that I am passing now--the lea, as it
+is called--is one of the loveliest of these favoured spots.  It is a
+little sheltered scene, retiring, as it were, from the village; sunk
+amidst higher lands, hills would be almost too grand a word; edged
+on one side by one gay high-road, and intersected by another; and
+surrounded by a most picturesque confusion of meadows, cottages,
+farms, and orchards; with a great pond in one corner, unusually
+bright and clear, giving a delightful cheerfulness and daylight to
+the picture.  The swallows haunt that pond; so do the children.
+There is a merry group round it now; I have seldom seen it without
+one.  Children love water, clear, bright, sparkling water; it
+excites and feeds their curiosity; it is motion and life.
+
+The path that I am treading leads to a less lively spot, to that
+large heavy building on one side of the common, whose solid wings,
+jutting out far beyond the main body, occupy three sides of a
+square, and give a cold, shadowy look to the court.  On one side is
+a gloomy garden, with an old man digging in it, laid out in straight
+dark beds of vegetables, potatoes, cabbages, onions, beans; all
+earthy and mouldy as a newly-dug grave.  Not a flower or flowering
+shrub!  Not a rose-tree or currant-bush!  Nothing but for sober,
+melancholy use.  Oh, different from the long irregular slips of the
+cottage-gardens, with their gay bunches of polyanthuses and
+crocuses, their wallflowers sending sweet odours through the narrow
+casement, and their gooseberry-trees bursting into a brilliancy of
+leaf, whose vivid greenness has the effect of a blossom on the eye!
+Oh, how different!  On the other side of this gloomy abode is a
+meadow of that deep, intense emerald hue, which denotes the presence
+of stagnant water, surrounded by willows at regular distances, and
+like the garden, separated from the common by a wide, moat-like
+ditch.  That is the parish workhouse.  All about it is solid,
+substantial, useful;--but so dreary! so cold! so dark!  There are
+children in the court, and yet all is silent.  I always hurry past
+that place as if it were a prison.  Restraint, sickness, age,
+extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power to remove or
+alleviate,--these are the ideas, the feelings, which the sight of
+those walls excites; yet, perhaps, if not certainly, they contain
+less of that extreme desolation than the morbid fancy is apt to
+paint.  There will be found order, cleanliness, food, clothing,
+warmth, refuge for the homeless, medicine and attendance for the
+sick, rest and sufficiency for old age, and sympathy, the true and
+active sympathy which the poor show to the poor, for the unhappy.
+There may be worse places than a parish workhouse--and yet I hurry
+past it.  The feeling, the prejudice, will not be controlled.
+
+The end of the dreary garden edges off into a close-sheltered lane,
+wandering and winding, like a rivulet, in gentle 'sinuosities' (to
+use a word once applied by Mr. Wilberforce to the Thames at Henley),
+amidst green meadows, all alive with cattle, sheep, and beautiful
+lambs, in the very spring and pride of their tottering prettiness;
+or fields of arable land, more lively still with troops of stooping
+bean-setters, women and children, in all varieties of costume and
+colour; and ploughs and harrows, with their whistling boys and
+steady carters, going through, with a slow and plodding industry,
+the main business of this busy season.  What work beansetting is!
+What a reverse of the position assigned to man to distinguish him
+from the beasts of the field!  Only think of stooping for six,
+eight, ten hours a day, drilling holes in the earth with a little
+stick, and then dropping in the beans one by one.  They are paid
+according to the quantity they plant; and some of the poor women
+used to be accused of clumping them--that is to say, of dropping
+more than one bean into a hole.  It seems to me, considering the
+temptation, that not to clump is to be at the very pinnacle of human
+virtue.
+
+Another turn in the lane, and we come to the old house standing
+amongst the high elms--the old farm-house, which always, I don't
+know why, carries back my imagination to Shakspeare's days.  It is a
+long, low, irregular building, with one room, at an angle from the
+house, covered with ivy, fine white-veined ivy; the first floor of
+the main building projecting and supported by oaken beams, and one
+of the windows below, with its old casement and long narrow panes,
+forming the half of a shallow hexagon.  A porch, with seats in it,
+surmounted by a pinnacle, pointed roofs, and clustered chimneys,
+complete the picture!  Alas! it is little else but a picture!  The
+very walls are crumbling to decay under a careless landlord and
+ruined tenant.
+
+Now a few yards farther, and I reach the bank.  Ah! I smell them
+already--their exquisite perfume steams and lingers in this moist,
+heavy air.  Through this little gate, and along the green south bank
+of this green wheat-field, and they burst upon me, the lovely
+violets, in tenfold loveliness.  The ground is covered with them,
+white and purple, enamelling the short dewy grass, looking but the
+more vividly coloured under the dull, leaden sky.  There they lie by
+hundreds, by thousands.  In former years I have been used to watch
+them from the tiny green bud, till one or two stole into bloom.
+They never came on me before in such a sudden and luxuriant glory of
+simple beauty,--and I do really owe one pure and genuine pleasure to
+feverish London!  How beautifully they are placed too, on this
+sloping bank, with the palm branches waving over them, full of early
+bees, and mixing their honeyed scent with the more delicate violet
+odour!  How transparent and smooth and lusty are the branches, full
+of sap and life!  And there, just by the old mossy root, is a superb
+tuft of primroses, with a yellow butterfly hovering over them, like
+a flower floating on the air.  What happiness to sit on this tufty
+knoll, and fill my basket with the blossoms!  What a renewal of
+heart and mind!  To inhabit such a scene of peace and sweetness is
+again to be fearless, gay, and gentle as a child.  Then it is that
+thought becomes poetry, and feeling religion.  Then it is that we
+are happy and good.  Oh, that my whole life could pass so, floating
+on blissful and innocent sensation, enjoying in peace and gratitude
+the common blessings of Nature, thankful above all for the simple
+habits, the healthful temperament, which render them so dear!  Alas!
+who may dare expect a life of such happiness?  But I can at least
+snatch and prolong the fleeting pleasure, can fill my basket with
+pure flowers, and my heart with pure thoughts; can gladden my little
+home with their sweetness; can divide my treasures with one, a dear
+one, who cannot seek them; can see them when I shut my eyes and
+dream of them when I fall asleep.
+
+
+THE COPSE.
+
+April 18th.--Sad wintry weather; a northeast wind; a sun that puts
+out one's eyes, without affording the slightest warmth; dryness that
+chaps lips and hands like a frost in December; rain that comes
+chilly and arrowy like hail in January; nature at a dead pause; no
+seeds up in the garden; no leaves out in the hedgerows; no cowslips
+swinging their pretty bells in the fields; no nightingales in the
+dingles; no swallows skimming round the great pond; no cuckoos (that
+ever I should miss that rascally sonneteer!) in any part.
+Nevertheless there is something of a charm in this wintry spring,
+this putting-back of the seasons.  If the flower-clock must stand
+still for a month or two, could it choose a better time than that of
+the primroses and violets?  I never remember (and for such gauds my
+memory, if not very good for aught of wise or useful, may be
+trusted) such an affluence of the one or such a duration of the
+other.  Primrosy is the epithet which this year will retain in my
+recollection.  Hedge, ditch, meadow, field, even the very paths and
+highways, are set with them; but their chief habitat is a certain
+copse, about a mile off, where they are spread like a carpet, and
+where I go to visit them rather oftener than quite comports with the
+dignity of a lady of mature age.  I am going thither this very
+afternoon, and May and her company are going too.
+
+This Mayflower of mine is a strange animal.  Instinct and imitation
+make in her an approach to reason which is sometimes almost
+startling.  She mimics all that she sees us do, with the dexterity
+of a monkey, and far more of gravity and apparent purpose; cracks
+nuts and eats them; gathers currants and severs them from the stalk
+with the most delicate nicety; filches and munches apples and pears;
+is as dangerous in an orchard as a schoolboy; smells to flowers;
+smiles at meeting; answers in a pretty lively voice when spoken to
+(sad pity that the language should be unknown!) and has greatly the
+advantage of us in a conversation, inasmuch as our meaning is
+certainly clear to her;--all this and a thousand amusing
+prettinesses (to say nothing of her canine feat of bringing her game
+straight to her master's feet, and refusing to resign it to any hand
+but his), does my beautiful greyhound perform untaught, by the mere
+effect of imitation and sagacity.  Well, May, at the end of the
+coursing season, having lost Brush, our old spaniel, her great
+friend, and the blue greyhound, Mariette, her comrade and rival,
+both of which four-footed worthies were sent out to keep for the
+summer, began to find solitude a weary condition, and to look abroad
+for company.  Now it so happened that the same suspension of sport
+which had reduced our little establishment from three dogs to one,
+had also dispersed the splendid kennel of a celebrated courser in
+our neighbourhood, three of whose finest young dogs came home to
+'their walk' (as the sporting phrase goes) at the collarmaker's in
+our village.  May, accordingly, on the first morning of her solitude
+(she had never taken the slightest notice of her neighbours before,
+although they had sojourned in our street upwards of a fortnight),
+bethought herself of the timely resource offered to her by the
+vicinity of these canine beaux, and went up boldly and knocked at
+their stable door, which was already very commodiously on the
+half-latch.  The three dogs came out with much alertness and
+gallantry, and May, declining apparently to enter their territories,
+brought them off to her own.  This manoeuvre has been repeated every
+day, with one variation; of the three dogs, the first a brindle, the
+second a yellow, and the third a black, the two first only are now
+allowed to walk or consort with her, and the last, poor fellow, for
+no fault that I can discover except May's caprice, is driven away
+not only by the fair lady, but even by his old companions--is, so to
+say, sent to Coventry.  Of her two permitted followers, the yellow
+gentleman, Saladin by name, is decidedly the favourite.  He is,
+indeed, May's shadow, and will walk with me whether I choose or not.
+It is quite impossible to get rid of him unless by discarding Miss
+May also;--and to accomplish a walk in the country without her,
+would be like an adventure of Don Quixote without his faithful
+'squire Sancho.
+
+So forth we set, May and I, and Saladin and the brindle; May and
+myself walking with the sedateness and decorum befitting our sex and
+age (she is five years old this grass, rising six)--the young
+things, for the soldan and the brindle are (not meaning any
+disrespect) little better than puppies, frisking and frolicking as
+best pleased them.
+
+Our route lay for the first part along the sheltered quiet lanes
+which lead to our old habitation; a way never trodden by me without
+peculiar and homelike feelings, full of the recollections, the pains
+and pleasures, of other days.  But we are not to talk sentiment
+now;--even May would not understand that maudlin language.  We must
+get on.  What a wintry hedgerow this is for the eighteenth of April!
+Primrosy to be sure, abundantly spangled with those stars of the
+earth,--but so bare, so leafless, so cold!  The wind whistles
+through the brown boughs as in winter.  Even the early elder shoots,
+which do make an approach to springiness, look brown, and the small
+leaves of the woodbine, which have also ventured to peep forth, are
+of a sad purple, frost-bitten, like a dairymaid's elbows on a snowy
+morning.  The very birds, in this season of pairing and building,
+look chilly and uncomfortable, and their nests!--'Oh, Saladin! come
+away from the hedge!  Don't you see that what puzzles you and makes
+you leap up in the air is a redbreast's nest?  Don't you see the
+pretty speckled eggs?  Don't you hear the poor hen calling as it
+were for help?  Come here this moment, sir!'  And by good luck
+Saladin (who for a paynim has tolerable qualities) comes, before he
+has touched the nest, or before his playmate the brindle, the less
+manageable of the two, has espied it.
+
+Now we go round the corner and cross the bridge, where the common,
+with its clear stream winding between clumps of elms, assumes so
+park-like an appearance.  Who is this approaching so slowly and
+majestically, this square bundle of petticoat and cloak, this
+road-waggon of a woman?  It is, it must be Mrs. Sally Mearing, the
+completest specimen within my knowledge of farmeresses (may I be
+allowed that innovation in language?) as they were.  It can be
+nobody else.
+
+Mrs. Sally Mearing, when I first became acquainted with her,
+occupied, together with her father (a superannuated man of ninety),
+a large farm very near our former habitation.  It had been anciently
+a great manor-farm or court-house, and was still a stately,
+substantial building, whose lofty halls and spacious chambers gave
+an air of grandeur to the common offices to which they were applied.
+Traces of gilding might yet be seen on the panels which covered the
+walls, and on the huge carved chimney-pieces which rose almost to
+the ceilings; and the marble tables and the inlaid oak staircase
+still spoke of the former grandeur of the court.  Mrs. Sally
+corresponded well with the date of her mansion, although she
+troubled herself little with its dignity.  She was thoroughly of the
+old school, and had a most comfortable contempt for the new:  rose
+at four in winter and summer, breakfasted at six, dined at eleven in
+the forenoon, supped at five, and was regularly in bed before eight,
+except when the hay-time or the harvest imperiously required her to
+sit up till sunset, a necessity to which she submitted with no very
+good grace.  To a deviation from these hours, and to the modern
+iniquities of white aprons, cotton stockings, and muslin
+handkerchiefs (Mrs. Sally herself always wore check, black worsted,
+and a sort of yellow compound which she was wont to call 'susy'),
+together with the invention of drill plough and thrashing-machines,
+and other agricultural novelties, she failed not to attribute all
+the mishaps or misdoings of the whole parish.  The last-mentioned
+discovery especially aroused her indignation.  Oh to hear her
+descant on the merits of the flail, wielded by a stout right arm,
+such as she had known in her youth (for by her account there was as
+great a deterioration in bones and sinews as in the other implements
+of husbandry), was enough to make the very inventor break his
+machine.  She would even take up her favourite instrument, and
+thrash the air herself by way of illustrating her argument, and, to
+say truth, few men in these degenerate days could have matched the
+stout, brawny, muscular limb which Mrs. Sally displayed at
+sixty-five.
+
+In spite of this contumacious rejection of agricultural
+improvements, the world went well with her at Court Farm.  A good
+landlord, an easy rent, incessant labour, unremitting frugality, and
+excellent times, insured a regular though moderate profit; and she
+lived on, grumbling and prospering, flourishing and complaining,
+till two misfortunes befell her at once--her father died, and her
+lease expired.  The loss of her father although a bedridden man,
+turned of ninety, who could not in the course of nature have been
+expected to live long, was a terrible shock to a daughter, who was
+not so much younger as to be without fears for her own life, and who
+had besides been so used to nursing the good old man, and looking to
+his little comforts, that she missed him as a mother would miss an
+ailing child.  The expiration of the lease was a grievance and a
+puzzle of a different nature.  Her landlord would have willingly
+retained his excellent tenant, but not on the terms on which she
+then held the land, which had not varied for fifty years; so that
+poor Mrs. Sally had the misfortune to find rent rising and prices
+sinking both at the same moment--a terrible solecism in political
+economy.  Even this, however, I believe she would have endured,
+rather than have quitted the house where she was born, and to which
+all her ways and notions were adapted, had not a priggish steward,
+as much addicted to improvement and reform as she was to precedent
+and established usages, insisted on binding her by lease to spread a
+certain number of loads of chalk on every field.  This tremendous
+innovation, for never had that novelty in manure whitened the crofts
+and pightles of Court Farm, decided her at once.  She threw the
+proposals into the fire, and left the place in a week.
+
+Her choice of a habitation occasioned some wonder, and much
+amusement in our village world.  To be sure, upon the verge of
+seventy, an old maid may be permitted to dispense with the more
+rigid punctilio of her class, but Mrs. Sally had always been so
+tenacious on the score of character, so very a prude, so determined
+an avoider of the 'men folk' (as she was wont contemptuously to call
+them), that we all were conscious of something like astonishment, on
+finding that she and her little handmaid had taken up their abode in
+one end of a spacious farmhouse belonging to the bluff old bachelor,
+George Robinson, of the Lea.  Now Farmer Robinson was quite as
+notorious for his aversion to petticoated things, as Mrs. Sally for
+her hatred to the unfeathered bipeds who wear doublet and hose, so
+that there was a little astonishment in that quarter too, and plenty
+of jests, which the honest farmer speedily silenced, by telling all
+who joked on the subject that he had given his lodger fair warning,
+that, let people say what they would, he was quite determined not to
+marry her:  so that if she had any views that way, it would be
+better for her to go elsewhere.  This declaration, which must be
+admitted to have been more remarkable for frankness than civility,
+made, however, no ill impression on Mrs. Sally.  To the farmer's she
+went, and at his house she lives still, with her little maid, her
+tabby cat, a decrepit sheep-dog, and much of the lumber of Court
+Farm, which she could not find in her heart to part from.  There she
+follows her old ways and her old hours, untempted by matrimony, and
+unassailed (as far as I hear) by love or by scandal, with no other
+grievance than an occasional dearth of employment for herself and
+her young lass (even pewter dishes do not always want scouring), and
+now and then a twinge of the rheumatism.
+
+Here she is, that good relique of the olden time--for, in spite of
+her whims and prejudices, a better and a kinder woman never lived--
+here she is, with the hood of her red cloak pulled over her close
+black bonnet, of that silk which once (it may be presumed) was
+fashionable, since it is still called mode, and her whole stout
+figure huddled up in a miscellaneous and most substantial covering
+of thick petticoats, gowns, aprons, shawls, and cloaks--a weight
+which it requires the strength of a thrasher to walk under--here she
+is, with her square honest visage, and her loud frank voice;--and we
+hold a pleasant disjointed chat of rheumatisms and early chickens,
+bad weather, and hats with feathers in them;--the last exceedingly
+sore subject being introduced by poor Jane Davis (a cousin of Mrs.
+Sally), who, passing us in a beaver bonnet, on her road from school,
+stopped to drop her little curtsy, and was soundly scolded for her
+civility.  Jane, who is a gentle, humble, smiling lass, about twelve
+years old, receives so many rebukes from her worthy relative, and
+bears them so meekly, that I should not wonder if they were to be
+followed by a legacy:  I sincerely wish they may.  Well, at last we
+said good-bye; when, on inquiring my destination, and hearing that I
+was bent
+to the ten-acre copse (part of the farm which she ruled so long),
+she stopped me to tell a dismal story of two sheep-stealers who,
+sixty years ago, were found hidden in that copse, and only taken
+after great difficulty and resistance, and the maiming of a
+peace-officer.--'Pray don't go there, Miss!  For mercy's sake don't
+be so venturesome!  Think if they should kill you!' were the last
+words of Mrs. Sally.
+
+Many thanks for her care and kindness!  But, without being at all
+foolhardy in general, I have no great fear of the sheep-stealers of
+sixty years ago.  Even if they escaped hanging for that exploit, I
+should greatly doubt their being in case to attempt another.  So on
+we go:  down the short shady lane, and out on the pretty retired
+green, shut in by fields and hedgerows, which we must cross to reach
+the copse.  How lively this green nook is to-day, half covered with
+cows, and horses, and sheep!  And how glad these frolicsome
+greyhounds are to exchange the hard gravel of the high road for this
+pleasant short turf, which seems made for their gambols!  How
+beautifully they are at play, chasing each other round and round in
+lessening circles, darting off at all kinds of angles, crossing and
+recrossing May, and trying to win her sedateness into a game at
+romps, turning round on each other with gay defiance, pursuing the
+cows and the colts, leaping up as if to catch the crows in their
+flight;--all in their harmless and innocent--'Ah, wretches!
+villains! rascals! four-footed mischiefs! canine plagues!  Saladin!
+Brindle!'--They are after the sheep--'Saladin, I say!'--They have
+actually singled out that pretty spotted lamb--'Brutes, if I catch
+you!  Saladin!  Brindle!'  We shall be taken up for sheep-stealing
+presently ourselves.  They have chased the poor little lamb into a
+ditch, and are mounting guard over it, standing at bay.--'Ah,
+wretches, I have you now! for shame, Saladin!  Get away, Brindle!
+See how good May is.  Off with you, brutes!  For shame!  For shame!'
+and brandishing a handkerchief, which could hardly be an efficient
+instrument of correction, I succeeded in driving away the two
+puppies, who after all meant nothing more than play, although it was
+somewhat rough, and rather too much in the style of the old fable of
+the boys and the frogs.  May is gone after them, perhaps to scold
+them:  for she has been as grave as a judge during the whole
+proceeding, keeping ostentatiously close to me, and taking no part
+whatever in the mischief.
+
+The poor little pretty lamb! here it lies on the bank quite
+motionless, frightened I believe to death, for certainly those
+villains never touched it.  It does not stir.  Does it breathe?  Oh
+yes, it does!  It is alive, safe enough.  Look, it opens its eyes,
+and, finding the coast clear and its enemies far away, it springs up
+in a moment and gallops to its dam, who has stood bleating the whole
+time at a most respectful distance.  Who would suspect a lamb of so
+much simple cunning?  I really thought the pretty thing was dead--
+and now how glad the ewe is to recover her curling spotted little
+one!  How fluttered they look!  Well! this adventure has flurried me
+too; between fright and running, I warrant you my heart beats as
+fast as the lamb's.
+
+Ah! here is the shameless villain Saladin, the cause of the
+commotion, thrusting his slender nose into my hand to beg pardon and
+make up!  'Oh wickedest of soldans!  Most iniquitous pagan!  Soul of
+a Turk!'--but there is no resisting the good-humoured creature's
+penitence.  I must pat him.  'There! there!  Now we will go to the
+copse; I am sure we shall find no worse malefactors than ourselves--
+shall we, May?--and the sooner we get out of sight of the sheep the
+better; for Brindle seems meditating another attack.  Allons,
+messieurs, over this gate, across this meadow, and here is the
+copse.'
+
+How boldly that superb ash-tree with its fine silver bark rises from
+the bank, and what a fine entrance it makes with the holly beside
+it, which also deserves to be called a tree!  But here we are in the
+copse.  Ah! only one half of the underwood was cut last year, and
+the other is at its full growth:  hazel, brier, woodbine, bramble,
+forming one impenetrable thicket, and almost uniting with the lower
+branches of the elms, and oaks, and beeches, which rise at regular
+distances overhead.  No foot can penetrate that dense and thorny
+entanglement; but there is a walk all round by the side of the wide
+sloping bank, walk and bank and copse carpeted with primroses, whose
+fresh and balmy odour impregnates the very air.  Oh how exquisitely
+beautiful! and it is not the primroses only, those gems of flowers,
+but the natural mosaic of which they form a part; that network of
+ground-ivy, with its lilac blossoms and the subdued tint of its
+purplish leaves, those rich mosses, those enamelled wild hyacinths,
+those spotted arums, and above all those wreaths of ivy linking all
+those flowers together with chains of leaves more beautiful than
+blossoms, whose white veins seem swelling amidst the deep green or
+splendid brown;--it is the whole earth that is so beautiful!  Never
+surely were primroses so richly set, and never did primroses better
+deserve such a setting.  There they are of their own lovely yellow,
+the hue to which they have given a name, the exact tint of the
+butterfly that overhangs them (the first I have seen this year! can
+spring really be coming at last?)--sprinkled here and there with
+tufts of a reddish purple, and others of the purest white, as some
+accident of soil affects that strange and inscrutable operation of
+nature, the colouring of flowers.  Oh how fragrant they are, and how
+pleasant it is to sit in this sheltered copse, listening to the fine
+creaking of the wind amongst the branches, the most unearthly of
+sounds, with this gay tapestry under our feet, and the wood-pigeons
+flitting from tree to tree, and mixing the deep note of love with
+the elemental music.
+
+Yes! spring is coming.  Wood-pigeons, butterflies, and sweet
+flowers, all give token of the sweetest of the seasons.  Spring is
+coming.  The hazel stalks are swelling and putting forth their pale
+tassels, the satin palms with their honeyed odours are out on the
+willow, and the last lingering winter berries are dropping from the
+hawthorn, and making way for the bright and blossomy leaves.
+
+
+
+THE WOOD.
+
+April 20th.--Spring is actually come now, with the fulness and
+almost the suddenness of a northern summer.  To-day is completely
+April;--clouds and sunshine, wind and showers; blossoms on the
+trees, grass in the fields, swallows by the ponds, snakes in the
+hedgerows, nightingales in the thickets, and cuckoos everywhere.  My
+young friend Ellen G. is going with me this evening to gather
+wood-sorrel.  She never saw that most elegant plant, and is so
+delicate an artist that the introduction will be a mutual benefit;
+Ellen will gain a subject worthy of her pencil, and the pretty weed
+will live;--no small favour to a flower almost as transitory as the
+gum cistus:  duration is the only charm which it wants, and that
+Ellen will give it.  The weather is, to be sure, a little
+threatening, but we are not people to mind the weather when we have
+an object in view; we shall certainly go in quest of the
+wood-sorrel, and will take May, provided we can escape May's
+followers; for since the adventure of the lamb, Saladin has had an
+affair with a gander, furious in defence of his goslings, in which
+rencontre the gander came off conqueror; and as geese abound in the
+wood to which we are going (called by the country people the Pinge),
+and the victory may not always incline to the right side, I should
+be very sorry to lead the Soldan to fight his battles over again.
+We will take nobody but May.
+
+So saying, we proceeded on our way through winding lanes, between
+hedgerows tenderly green, till we reached the hatch-gate, with the
+white cottage beside it embosomed in fruit-trees, which forms the
+entrance to the Pinge, and in a moment the whole scene was before
+our eyes.
+
+'Is not this beautiful, Ellen?'  The answer could hardly be other
+than a glowing rapid 'Yes!'--A wood is generally a pretty place; but
+this wood--Imagine a smaller forest, full of glades and sheep-walks,
+surrounded by irregular cottages with their blooming orchards, a
+clear stream winding about the brakes, and a road intersecting it,
+and giving life and light to the picture; and you will have a faint
+idea of the Pinge.  Every step was opening a new point of view, a
+fresh combination of glade and path and thicket.  The accessories
+too were changing every moment.  Ducks, geese, pigs, and children,
+giving way, as we advanced into the wood, to sheep and forest
+ponies; and they again disappearing as we became more entangled in
+its mazes, till we heard nothing but the song of the nightingale,
+and saw only the silent flowers.
+
+What a piece of fairy land!  The tall elms overhead just bursting
+into tender vivid leaf, with here and there a hoary oak or a
+silver-barked beech, every twig swelling with the brown buds, and
+yet not quite stripped of the tawny foliage of autumn; tall hollies
+and hawthorn beneath, with their crisp brilliant leaves mixed with
+the white blossoms of the sloe, and woven together with garlands of
+woodbines and wild-briers;--what a fairy land!
+
+Primroses, cowslips, pansies, and the regular open-eyed white
+blossom of the wood anemone (or, to use the more elegant Hampshire
+name, the windflower), were set under our feet as thick as daisies
+in a meadow; but the pretty weed that we came to seek was coyer; and
+Ellen began to fear that we had mistaken the place or the season.--
+At last she had herself the pleasure of finding it under a brake of
+holly--'Oh, look! look! I am sure that this is the wood-sorrel!
+Look at the pendent white flower, shaped like a snowdrop and veined
+with purple streaks, and the beautiful trefoil leaves folded like a
+heart,--some, the young ones, so vividly yet tenderly green that the
+foliage of the elm and the hawthorn would show dully at their side,-
+-others of a deeper tint, and lined, as it were, with a rich and
+changeful purple!--Don't you see them?' pursued my dear young
+friend, who is a delightful piece of life and sunshine, and was half
+inclined to scold me for the calmness with which, amused by her
+enthusiasm, I stood listening to her ardent exclamations--'Don't you
+see them?  Oh how beautiful! and in what quantity! what profusion!
+See how the dark shade of the holly sets off the light and delicate
+colouring of the flower!--And see that other bed of them springing
+from the rich moss in the roots of that old beech-tree!  Pray, let
+us gather some.  Here are baskets.'  So, quickly and carefully we
+began gathering, leaves, blossoms, roots and all, for the plant is
+so fragile that it will not brook separation;--quickly and carefully
+we gathered, encountering divers petty misfortunes in spite of all
+our care, now caught by the veil in a holly bush, now hitching our
+shawls in a bramble, still gathering on, in spite of scratched
+fingers, till we had nearly filled our baskets and began to talk of
+our departure:--
+
+'But where is May?  May!  May!  No going home without her.  May!
+Here she comes galloping, the beauty!'--(Ellen is almost as fond of
+May as I am.)--'What has she got in her mouth? that rough, round,
+brown substance which she touches so tenderly?  What can it be?  A
+bird's nest?  Naughty May!'
+
+'No! as I live, a hedgehog!  Look, Ellen, how it has coiled itself
+into a thorny ball!  Off with it, May!  Don't bring it to me!'--And
+May, somewhat reluctant to part with her prickly prize, however
+troublesome of carriage, whose change of shape seemed to me to have
+puzzled her sagacity more than any event I ever witnessed, for in
+general she has perfectly the air of understanding all that is going
+forward--May at last dropt the hedgehog; continuing, however, to pat
+it with her delicate cat-like paw, cautiously and daintily applied,
+and caught back suddenly and rapidly after every touch, as if her
+poor captive had been a red-hot coal.  Finding that these pats
+entirely failed in solving the riddle (for the hedgehog shammed
+dead, like the lamb the other day, and appeared entirely
+motionless), she gave him so spirited a nudge with her pretty black
+nose, that she not only turned him over, but sent him rolling some
+little way along the turfy path,--an operation which that sagacious
+quadruped endured with the most perfect passiveness, the most
+admirable non-resistance.  No wonder that May's discernment was at
+fault, I myself, if I had not been aware of the trick, should have
+said that the ugly rough thing which she was trundling along, like a
+bowl or a cricket-ball, was an inanimate substance, something devoid
+of sensation and of will.  At last my poor pet, thoroughly perplexed
+and tired out, fairly relinquished the contest, and came slowly
+away, turning back once or twice to look at the object of her
+curiosity, as if half inclined to return and try the event of
+another shove.  The sudden flight of a wood-pigeon effectually
+diverted her attention; and Ellen amused herself by fancying how the
+hedgehog was scuttling away, till our notice was also attracted by a
+very different object.
+
+We had nearly threaded the wood, and were approaching an open grove
+of magnificent oaks on the other side, when sounds other than of
+nightingales burst on our ear, the deep and frequent strokes of the
+woodman's axe, and emerging from the Pinge we discovered the havoc
+which that axe had committed.  Above twenty of the finest trees lay
+stretched on the velvet turf.  There they lay in every shape and
+form of devastation:  some, bare trunks stripped ready for the
+timber carriage, with the bark built up in long piles at the side;
+some with the spoilers busy about them, stripping, hacking, hewing;
+others with their noble branches, their brown and fragrant shoots
+all fresh as if they were alive--majestic corses, the slain of
+to-day!  The grove was like a field of battle.  The young lads who
+were stripping the bark, the very children who were picking up the
+chips, seemed awed and silent, as if conscious that death was around
+them.  The nightingales sang faintly and interruptedly--a few low
+frightened notes like a requiem.
+
+Ah! here we are at the very scene of murder, the very tree that they
+are felling; they have just hewn round the trunk with those
+slaughtering axes, and are about to saw it asunder.  After all, it
+is a fine and thrilling operation, as the work of death usually is.
+Into how grand an attitude was that young man thrown as he gave the
+final strokes round the root; and how wonderful is the effect of
+that supple and apparently powerless saw, bending like a riband, and
+yet overmastering that giant of the woods, conquering and
+overthrowing that thing of life!  Now it has passed half through the
+trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate which way the tree
+will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its course;--now a few more
+movements of the noiseless saw; and then a larger wedge.  See how
+the branches tremble!  Hark how the trunk begins to crack!  Another
+stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree quivers, as
+with a mortal agony, shakes, reels, and falls.  How slow, and
+solemn, and awful it is!  How like to death, to human death in its
+grandest form!  Caesar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not
+fall more sublimely than that oak.
+
+Even the heavens seem to sympathise with the devastation.  The
+clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as
+the smoke which overhangs London; the setting sun is just gleaming
+underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays
+spreading upward with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and
+dusky glow, like the light reflected on the sky from some vast
+conflagration.  The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to
+descend; and we hurry homeward rapidly, yet sadly, forgetful alike
+of the flowers, the hedgehog, and the wetting, thinking and talking
+only of the fallen tree.
+
+
+
+THE DELL.
+
+May 2nd.--A delicious evening;--bright sunshine; light summer air; a
+sky almost cloudless; and a fresh yet delicate verdure on the hedges
+and in the fields;--an evening that seems made for a visit to my
+newly-discovered haunt, the mossy dell, one of the most beautiful
+spots in the neighbourhood, which after passing, times out of
+number, the field which it terminates, we found out about two months
+ago from the accident of May's killing a rabbit there.  May has had
+a fancy for the place ever since; and so have I.
+
+Thither accordingly we bend our way;--through the village;--up the
+hill;--along the common;--past the avenue;--across the bridge; and
+by the hill.  How deserted the road is to-night!  We have not seen a
+single acquaintance, except poor blind Robert, laden with his sack
+of grass plucked from the hedges, and the little boy that leads him.
+A singular division of labour!  Little Jem guides Robert to the
+spots where the long grass grows, and tells him where it is most
+plentiful; and then the old man cuts it close to the roots, and
+between them they fill the sack, and sell the contents in the
+village.  Half the cows in the street--for our baker, our
+wheelwright, and our shoemaker has each his Alderney--owe the best
+part of their maintenance to blind Robert's industry.
+
+Here we are at the entrance of the cornfield which leads to the
+dell, and which commands so fine a view of the Loddon, the mill, the
+great farm, with its picturesque outbuildings, and the range of
+woody hills beyond.  It is impossible not to pause a moment at that
+gate, the landscape, always beautiful, is so suited to the season
+and the hour,--so bright, and gay, and spring-like.  But May, who
+has the chance of another rabbit in her pretty head, has galloped
+forward to the dingle, and poor May, who follows me so faithfully in
+all my wanderings, has a right to a little indulgence in hers.  So
+to the dingle we go.
+
+At the end of the field, which when seen from the road seems
+terminated by a thick dark coppice, we come suddenly to the edge of
+a ravine, on one side fringed with a low growth of alder, birch, and
+willow, on the other mossy, turfy, and bare, or only broken by
+bright tufts of blossomed broom.  One or two old pollards almost
+conceal the winding road that leads down the descent, by the side of
+which a spring as bright as crystal runs gurgling along.  The dell
+itself is an irregular piece of broken ground, in some parts very
+deep, intersected by two or three high banks of equal irregularity,
+now abrupt and bare, and rocklike, now crowned with tufts of the
+feathery willow or magnificent old thorns.  Everywhere the earth is
+covered by short, fine turf, mixed with mosses, soft, beautiful, and
+various, and embossed with the speckled leaves and lilac flowers of
+the arum, the paler blossoms of the common orchis, the enamelled
+blue of the wild hyacinth, so splendid in this evening light, and
+large tufts of oxslips and cowslips rising like nosegays from the
+short turf.
+
+The ground on the other side of the dell is much lower than the
+field through which we came, so that it is mainly to the
+labyrinthine intricacy of these high banks that it owes its singular
+character of wildness and variety.  Now we seem hemmed in by those
+green cliffs, shut out from all the world, with nothing visible but
+those verdant mounds and the deep blue sky; now by some sudden turn
+we get a peep at an adjoining meadow, where the sheep are lying,
+dappling its sloping surface like the small clouds on the summer
+heaven.  Poor harmless, quiet creatures, how still they are!  Some
+socially lying side by side; some grouped in threes and fours; some
+quite apart.  Ah! there are lambs amongst them--pretty, pretty
+lambs--nestled in by their mothers.  Soft, quiet, sleepy things!
+Not all so quiet, though!  There is a party of these young lambs as
+wide awake as heart can desire; half a dozen of them playing
+together, frisking, dancing, leaping, butting, and crying in the
+young voice, which is so pretty a diminutive of the full-grown
+bleat.  How beautiful they are with their innocent spotted faces,
+their mottled feet, their long curly tails, and their light flexible
+forms, frolicking like so many kittens, but with a gentleness, an
+assurance of sweetness and innocence, which no kitten, nothing that
+ever is to be a cat, can have.  How complete and perfect is their
+enjoyment of existence!  Ah! little rogues! your play has been too
+noisy; you have awakened your mammas; and two or three of the old
+ewes are getting up; and one of them marching gravely to the troop
+of lambs has selected her own, given her a gentle butt, and trotted
+off; the poor rebuked lamb following meekly, but every now and then
+stopping and casting a longing look at its playmates; who, after a
+moment's awed pause, had resumed their gambols; whilst the stately
+dame every now and then looked back in her turn, to see that her
+little one was following.  At last she lay down, and the lamb by her
+side.  I never saw so pretty a pastoral scene in my life.*
+
+*I have seen one which affected me much more.  Walking in the
+Church-lane with one of the young ladies of the vicarage, we met a
+large flock of sheep, with the usual retinue of shepherds and dogs.
+Lingering after them and almost out of sight, we encountered a
+straggling ewe, now trotting along, now walking, and every now and
+then stopping to look back, and bleating.  A little behind her came
+a lame lamb, bleating occasionally, as if in answer to its dam, and
+doing its very best to keep up with her.  It was a lameness of both
+the fore-feet; the knees were bent, and it seemed to walk on the
+very edge of the hoof--on tip-toe, if I may venture such an
+expression.  My young friend thought that the lameness proceeded
+from original malformation, I am rather of opinion that it was
+accidental, and that the poor creature was wretchedly foot-sore.
+However that might be, the pain and difficulty with which it took
+every step were not to be mistaken; and the distress and fondness of
+the mother, her perplexity as the flock passed gradually out of
+sight, the effort with which the poor lamb contrived to keep up a
+sort of trot, and their mutual calls and lamentations were really so
+affecting, that Ellen and I, although not at all lachrymose sort of
+people, had much ado not to cry.  We could not find a boy to carry
+the lamb, which was too big for us to manage;--but I was quite sure
+that the ewe would not desert it, and as the dark was coming on, we
+both trusted that the shepherds on folding their flock would miss
+them and return for them;--and so I am happy to say it proved.
+
+Another turning of the dell gives a glimpse of the dark coppice by
+which it is backed, and from which we are separated by some marshy,
+rushy ground, where the springs have formed into a pool, and where
+the moor-hen loves to build her nest.  Ay, there is one scudding
+away now;--I can hear her plash into the water, and the rustling of
+her wings amongst the rushes.  This is the deepest part of the wild
+dingle.  How uneven the ground is!  Surely these excavations, now so
+thoroughly clothed with vegetation, must originally have been huge
+gravel pits; there is no other way of accounting for the labyrinth,
+for they do dig gravel in such capricious meanders; but the quantity
+seems incredible.  Well! there is no end of guessing!  We are
+getting amongst the springs, and must turn back.  Round this corner,
+where on ledges like fairy terraces the orchises and arums grow, and
+we emerge suddenly on a new side of the dell, just fronting the
+small homestead of our good neighbour Farmer Allen.
+
+This rustic dwelling belongs to what used to be called in this part
+of the country 'a little bargain':  thirty or forty acres, perhaps,
+of arable land, which the owner and his sons cultivated themselves,
+whilst the wife and daughters assisted in the husbandry, and eked
+out the slender earnings by the produce of the dairy, the poultry
+yard, and the orchard;--an order of cultivators now passing rapidly
+away, but in which much of the best part of the English character,
+its industry, its frugality, its sound sense, and its kindness might
+be found.  Farmer Allen himself is an excellent specimen, the
+cheerful venerable old man with his long white hair, and his bright
+grey eye, and his wife is a still finer.  They have had a hard
+struggle to win through the world and keep their little property
+undivided; but good management and good principles, and the
+assistance afforded them by an admirable son, who left our village a
+poor 'prentice boy, and is now a partner in a great house in London
+have enabled them to overcome all the difficulties of these trying
+times, and they are now enjoying the peaceful evenings of a
+well-spent life as free from care and anxiety as their best friends
+could desire.
+
+Ah! there is Mr. Allen in the orchard, the beautiful orchard, with
+its glorious gardens of pink and white, its pearly pear-blossoms and
+coral apple-buds.  What a flush of bloom it is!  How brightly
+delicate it appears, thrown into strong relief by the dark house and
+the weather-stained barn, in this soft evening light!  The very
+grass is strewed with the snowy petals of the pear and the cherry.
+And there sits Mrs. Allen, feeding her poultry, with her three
+little grand-daughters from London, pretty fairies from three years
+old to five (only two-and-twenty months elapsed between the birth of
+the eldest and the youngest) playing round her feet.
+
+Mrs. Allen, my dear Mrs. Allen, has been that rare thing a beauty,
+and although she be now an old woman I had almost said that she is
+so still.  Why should I not say so?  Nobleness of feature and
+sweetness of expression are surely as delightful in age as in youth.
+Her face and figure are much like those which are stamped indelibly
+on the memory of every one who ever saw that grand specimen of
+woman--Mrs. Siddons.  The outline of Mrs. Allen's face is exactly
+the same; but there is more softness, more gentleness, a more
+feminine composure in the eye and in the smile.  Mrs. Allen never
+played Lady Macbeth.  Her hair, almost as black as at twenty, is
+parted on her large fair forehead, and combed under her exquisitely
+neat and snowy cap; a muslin neckerchief, a grey stuff gown and a
+white apron complete the picture.
+
+There she sits under an old elder-tree which flings its branches
+over her like a canopy, whilst the setting sun illumines her
+venerable figure and touches the leaves with an emerald light; there
+she sits, placid and smiling, with her spectacles in her hand and a
+measure of barley on her lap, into which the little girls are
+dipping their chubby hands and scattering the corn amongst the ducks
+and chickens with unspeakable glee.  But those ingrates the poultry
+don't seem so pleased and thankful as they ought to be; they
+mistrust their young feeders.  All domestic animals dislike
+children, partly from an instinctive fear of their tricks and their
+thoughtlessness; partly, I suspect, from jealousy.  Jealousy seems a
+strange tragic passion to attribute to the inmates of the basse
+cour,--but only look at that strutting fellow of a bantam cock
+(evidently a favourite), who sidles up to his old mistress with an
+air half affronted and half tender, turning so scornfully from the
+barley-corns which Annie is flinging towards him, and say if he be
+not as jealous as Othello?  Nothing can pacify him but Mrs. Allen's
+notice and a dole from her hand.  See, she is calling to him and
+feeding him, and now how he swells out his feathers, and flutters
+his wings, and erects his glossy neck, and struts and crows and
+pecks, proudest and happiest of bantams, the pet and glory of the
+poultry yard!
+
+In the meantime my own pet May, who has all this while been peeping
+into every hole, and penetrating every nook and winding of the dell,
+in hopes to find another rabbit, has returned to my side, and is
+sliding her snake-like head into my hand, at once to invite the
+caress which she likes so well, and to intimate, with all due
+respect, that it is time to go home.  The setting sun gives the same
+warning; and in a moment we are through the dell, the field, and the
+gate, past the farm and the mill, and hanging over the bridge that
+crosses the Loddon river.
+
+What a sunset! how golden! how beautiful!  The sun just
+disappearing, and the narrow liny clouds, which a few minutes ago
+lay like soft vapoury streaks along the horizon, lighted up with a
+golden splendour that the eye can scarcely endure, and those still
+softer clouds which floated above them wreathing and curling into a
+thousand fantastic forms, as thin and changeful as summer smoke, now
+defined and deepened into grandeur, and edged with ineffable,
+insufferable light!  Another minute and the brilliant orb totally
+disappears, and the sky above grows every moment more varied and
+more beautiful as the dazzling golden lines are mixed with glowing
+red and gorgeous purple, dappled with small dark specks, and mingled
+with such a blue as the egg of the hedge-sparrow.  To look up at
+that glorious sky, and then to see that magnificent picture
+reflected in the clear and lovely Loddon water, is a pleasure never
+to be described and never forgotten.  My heart swells and my eyes
+fill as I write of it, and think of the immeasurable majesty of
+nature, and the unspeakable goodness of God, who has spread an
+enjoyment so pure, so peaceful, and so intense before the meanest
+and the lowliest of His creatures.
+
+
+
+THE COWSLIP-BALL.
+
+May 16th.--There are moments in life when, without any visible or
+immediate cause, the spirits sink and fail, as it were, under the
+mere pressure of existence:  moments of unaccountable depression,
+when one is weary of one's very thoughts, haunted by images that
+will not depart--images many and various, but all painful; friends
+lost, or changed, or dead; hopes disappointed even in their
+accomplishment; fruitless regrets, powerless wishes, doubt and fear,
+and self-distrust, and self-disapprobation.  They who have known
+these feelings (and who is there so happy as not to have known some
+of them?) will understand why Alfieri became powerless, and
+Froissart dull; and why even needle-work, the most effectual
+sedative, that grand soother and composer of woman's distress, fails
+to comfort me to-day.  I will go out into the air this cool,
+pleasant afternoon, and try what that will do.  I fancy that
+exercise or exertion of any kind, is the true specific for
+nervousness.  'Fling but a stone, the giant dies.'  I will go to the
+meadows, the beautiful meadows! and I will have my materials of
+happiness, Lizzy and May, and a basket for flowers, and we will make
+a cowslip-ball.  'Did you ever see a cowslip-ball, my Lizzy?'--
+'No.'--'Come away, then; make haste! run, Lizzy!'
+
+And on we go, fast, fast! down the road, across the lea, past the
+workhouse, along by the great pond, till we slide into the deep
+narrow lane, whose hedges seem to meet over the water, and win our
+way to the little farmhouse at the end.  'Through the farmyard,
+Lizzy; over the gate; never mind the cows; they are quiet enough.'--
+'I don't mind 'em,' said Miss Lizzy, boldly and truly, and with a
+proud affronted air, displeased at being thought to mind anything,
+and showing by her attitude and manner some design of proving her
+courage by an attack on the largest of the herd, in the shape of a
+pull by the tail.  'I don't mind 'em.'--'I know you don't, Lizzy;
+but let them alone, and don't chase the turkey-cock.  Come to me, my
+dear!' and, for a wonder, Lizzy came.
+
+In the meantime, my other pet, Mayflower, had also gotten into a
+scrape.  She had driven about a huge unwieldy sow, till the animal's
+grunting had disturbed the repose of a still more enormous
+Newfoundland dog, the guardian of the yard.  Out he sallied,
+growling, from the depth of his kennel, erecting his tail, and
+shaking his long chain.  May's attention was instantly diverted from
+the sow to this new playmate, friend or foe, she cared not which;
+and he of the kennel, seeing his charge unhurt, and out of danger,
+was at leisure to observe the charms of his fair enemy, as she
+frolicked round him, always beyond the reach of his chain, yet
+always, with the natural instinctive coquetry of her sex, alluring
+him to the pursuit which she knew to be vain.  I never saw a
+prettier flirtation.  At last the noble animal, wearied out, retired
+to the inmost recesses of his habitation, and would not even
+approach her when she stood right before the entrance.  'You are
+properly served, May.  Come along, Lizzy.  Across this wheatfield,
+and now over the gate.  Stop! let me lift you down.  No jumping, no
+breaking of necks, Lizzy!'  And here we are in the meadows, and out
+of the world.  Robinson Crusoe, in his lonely island, had scarcely a
+more complete, or a more beautiful solitude.
+
+These meadows consist of a double row of small enclosures of rich
+grass-land, a mile or two in length, sloping down from high arable
+grounds on either side, to a little nameless brook that winds
+between them with a course which, in its infinite variety,
+clearness, and rapidity, seems to emulate the bold rivers of the
+north, of whom, far more than of our lazy southern streams, our
+rivulet presents a miniature likeness.  Never was water more
+exquisitely tricksy:--now darting over the bright pebbles, sparkling
+and flashing in the light with a bubbling music, as sweet and wild
+as the song of the woodlark; now stretching quietly along, giving
+back the rich tufts of the golden marsh-marigolds which grow on its
+margin; now sweeping round a fine reach of green grass, rising
+steeply into a high mound, a mimic promontory, whilst the other side
+sinks softly away, like some tiny bay, and the water flows between,
+so clear, so wide, so shallow, that Lizzy, longing for adventure, is
+sure she could cross unwetted; now dashing through two sand-banks, a
+torrent deep and narrow, which May clears at a bound; now sleeping,
+half hidden, beneath the alders, and hawthorns, and wild roses, with
+which the banks are so profusely and variously fringed, whilst
+flags,* lilies, and other aquatic plants, almost cover the surface
+of the stream.  In good truth, it is a beautiful brook, and one that
+Walton himself might have sitten by and loved, for trout are there;
+we see them as they dart up the stream, and hear and start at the
+sudden plunge when they spring to the surface for the summer flies.
+Izaak Walton would have loved our brook and our quiet meadows; they
+breathe the very spirit of his own peacefulness, a soothing quietude
+that sinks into the soul.  There is no path through them, not one;
+we might wander a whole spring day, and not see a trace of human
+habitation.  They belong to a number of small proprietors, who allow
+each other access through their respective grounds, from pure
+kindness and neighbourly feeling; a privilege never abused:  and the
+fields on the other side of the water are reached by a rough plank,
+or a tree thrown across, or some such homely bridge.  We ourselves
+possess one of the most beautiful; so that the strange pleasure of
+property, that instinct which makes Lizzy delight in her broken
+doll, and May in the bare bone which she has pilfered from the
+kennel of her recreant admirer of Newfoundland, is added to the
+other charms of this enchanting scenery; a strange pleasure it is,
+when one so poor as I can feel it!  Perhaps it is felt most by the
+poor, with the rich it may be less intense--too much diffused and
+spread out, becoming thin by expansion, like leaf-gold; the little
+of the poor may be not only more precious, but more pleasant to
+them:  certain that bit of grassy and blossomy earth, with its green
+knolls and tufted bushes, its old pollards wreathed with ivy, and
+its bright and babbling waters, is very dear to me.  But I must
+always have loved these meadows, so fresh, and cool, and delicious
+to the eye and to the tread, full of cowslips, and of all vernal
+flowers:  Shakspeare's 'Song of Spring' bursts irrepressibly from
+our lips as we step on them.
+
+*Walking along these meadows one bright sunny afternoon, a year or
+two back, and rather later in the season, I had an opportunity of
+noticing a curious circumstance in natural history.  Standing close
+to the edge of the stream, I remarked a singular appearance on a
+large tuft of flags.  It looked like bunches of flowers, the leaves
+of which seemed dark, yet transparent, intermingled with brilliant
+tubes of bright blue or shining green.  On examining this phenomenon
+more closely, it turned out to be several clusters of dragon-flies,
+just emerged from their deformed chrysalis state, and still torpid
+and motionless from the wetness of their filmy wings.  Half an hour
+later we returned to the spot and they were gone.  We had seen them
+at the very moment when beauty was complete and animation dormant.
+I have since found nearly a similar account of this curious process
+in Mr. Bingley's very entertaining work, called 'Animal Biography.'
+
+     'When daisies pied and violets blue
+          And lady-smocks all silver-white
+      And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
+          Do paint the meadows with delight,
+      The cuckoo then, on every tree--'
+
+'Cuckoo! cuckoo!' cried Lizzy, breaking in with her clear childish
+voice; and immediately, as if at her call, the real bird, from a
+neighbouring tree (for these meadows are dotted with timber like a
+park), began to echo my lovely little girl, 'cuckoo! cuckoo!'  I
+have a prejudice very unpastoral and unpoetical (but I cannot help
+it, I have many such) against this 'harbinger of spring.'  His note
+is so monotonous, so melancholy; and then the boys mimic him; one
+hears 'cuckoo! cuckoo!' in dirty streets, amongst smoky houses, and
+the bird is hated for faults not his own.  But prejudices of taste,
+likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason; so,
+to escape the serenade from the tree, which promised to be of
+considerable duration (when once that eternal song begins, on it
+goes ticking like a clock)--to escape that noise I determined to
+excite another, and challenged Lizzy to a cowslip-gathering; a trial
+of skill and speed, to see which should soonest fill her basket.  My
+stratagem succeeded completely.  What scrambling, what shouting,
+what glee from Lizzy! twenty cuckoos might have sung unheard whilst
+she was pulling her own flowers, and stealing mine, and laughing,
+screaming, and talking through all.
+
+At last the baskets were filled, and Lizzy declared victor:  and
+down we sat, on the brink of the stream, under a spreading hawthorn,
+just disclosing its own pearly buds, and surrounded with the rich
+and enamelled flowers of the wild hyacinth, blue and white, to make
+our cowslip-ball.  Every one knows the process:  to nip off the tuft
+of flowerets just below the top of the stalk, and hang each cluster
+nicely balanced across a riband, till you have a long string like a
+garland; then to press them closely together, and tie them tightly
+up.  We went on very prosperously, CONSIDERING; as people say of a
+young lady's drawing, or a Frenchman's English, or a woman's
+tragedy, or of the poor little dwarf who works without fingers, or
+the ingenious sailor who writes with his toes, or generally of any
+performance which is accomplished by means seemingly inadequate to
+its production.  To be sure we met with a few accidents.  First,
+Lizzy spoiled nearly all her cowslips by snapping them off too
+short; so there was a fresh gathering; in the next place, May
+overset my full basket, and sent the blossoms floating, like so many
+fairy favours, down the brook; then, when we were going on pretty
+steadily, just as we had made a superb wreath, and were thinking of
+tying it together, Lizzy, who held the riband, caught a glimpse of a
+gorgeous butterfly, all brown and red and purple, and, skipping off
+to pursue the new object, let go her hold; so all our treasures were
+abroad again.  At last, however, by dint of taking a branch of alder
+as a substitute for Lizzy, and hanging the basket in a pollard-ash,
+out of sight of May, the cowslip-ball was finished.  What a
+concentration of fragrance and beauty it was! golden and sweet to
+satiety! rich to sight, and touch, and smell!  Lizzy was enchanted,
+and ran off with her prize, hiding amongst the trees in the very
+coyness of ecstasy, as if any human eye, even mine, would be a
+restraint on her innocent raptures.
+
+In the meanwhile I sat listening, not to my enemy the cuckoo, but to
+a whole concert of nightingales, scarcely interrupted by any meaner
+bird, answering and vying with each other in those short delicious
+strains which are to the ear as roses to the eye:  those snatches of
+lovely sound which come across us as airs from heaven.  Pleasant
+thoughts, delightful associations, awoke as I listened; and almost
+unconsciously I repeated to myself the beautiful story of the Lutist
+and the Nightingale, from Ford's 'Lover's Melancholy.'  Here it is.
+Is there in English poetry anything finer?
+
+    'Passing from Italy to Greece, the tales
+     Which poets of an elder time have feign'd
+     To glorify their Tempe, bred in me
+     Desire of visiting Paradise.
+     To Thessaly I came, and living private,
+     Without acquaintance of more sweet companions
+     Than the old inmates to my love, my thoughts,
+     I day by day frequented silent groves
+     And solitary walks.  One morning early
+     This accident encounter'd me:  I heard
+     The sweetest and most ravishing contention
+     That art and nature ever were at strife in.
+     A sound of music touch'd mine ears, or rather
+     Indeed entranced my soul; as I stole nearer,
+     Invited by the melody, I saw
+     This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute
+     With strains of strange variety and harmony
+     Proclaiming, as it seem'd, so bold a challenge
+     To the clear choristers of the woods, the birds,
+     That as they flock'd about him, all stood silent,
+     Wondering at what they heard.  I wonder'd too.
+     A nightingale,
+     Nature's best skill'd musician, undertakes
+     The challenge; and for every several strain
+     The well-shaped youth could touch, she sang him down.
+     He could not run divisions with more art
+     Upon his quaking instrument than she,
+     The nightingale, did with her various notes
+     Reply to.
+
+     Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last
+     Into a pretty anger, that a bird,
+     Whom art had never taught cliffs, moods, or notes
+     Should vie with him for mastery, whose study
+     Had busied many hours to perfect practice.
+     To end the controversy, in a rapture
+     Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly,
+     So many voluntaries, and so quick,
+     That there was curiosity and cunning,
+     Concord in discord, lines of differing method
+     Meeting in one full centre of delight.
+     The bird (ordain'd to be
+     Music's first martyr) strove to imitate
+     These several sounds; which when her warbling throat
+     Fail'd in, for grief down dropt she on his lute,
+     And brake her heart.  It was the quaintest sadness
+     To see the conqueror upon her hearse
+     To weep a funeral elegy of tears.
+     He look'd upon the trophies of his art,
+     Then sigh'd, then wiped his eyes; then sigh'd, and cry'd
+     "Alas! poor creature, I will soon revenge
+     This cruelty upon the author of it.
+     Henceforth this lute, guilty of innocent blood,
+     Shall never more betray a harmless peace
+     To an untimely end:"  and in that sorrow,
+     As he was pashing it against a tree,
+     I suddenly stept in.'
+
+When I had finished the recitation of this exquisite passage, the
+sky, which had been all the afternoon dull and heavy, began to look
+more and more threatening; darker clouds, like wreaths of black
+smoke, flew across the dead leaden tint; a cooler, damper air blew
+over the meadows, and a few large heavy drops splashed in the water.
+'We shall have a storm.  Lizzy!  May! where are ye?  Quick, quick,
+my Lizzy! run, run! faster, faster!'
+
+And off we ran; Lizzy not at all displeased at the thoughts of a
+wetting, to which indeed she is almost as familiar as a duck; May,
+on the other hand, peering up at the weather, and shaking her pretty
+ears with manifest dismay.  Of all animals, next to a cat, a
+greyhound dreads rain.  She might have escaped it; her light feet
+would have borne her home long before the shower; but May is too
+faithful for that, too true a comrade, understands too well the laws
+of good-fellowship; so she waited for us.  She did, to be sure,
+gallop on before, and then stop and look back, and beckon, as it
+were, with some scorn in her black eyes at the slowness of our
+progress.  We in the meanwhile got on as fast as we could,
+encouraging and reproaching each other.  'Faster, my Lizzy!  Oh,
+what a bad runner!'--'Faster, faster!  Oh, what a bad runner!'
+echoed my saucebox.  'You are so fat, Lizzy, you make no way!'--'Ah!
+who else is fat?' retorted the darling.  Certainly her mother is
+right; I do spoil that child.
+
+By this time we were thoroughly soaked, all three.  It was a pelting
+shower, that drove through our thin summer clothing and poor May's
+short glossy coat in a moment.  And then, when we were wet to the
+skin, the sun came out, actually the sun, as if to laugh at our
+plight; and then, more provoking still, when the sun was shining,
+and the shower over, came a maid and a boy to look after us, loaded
+with cloaks and umbrellas enough to fence us against a whole day's
+rain.  Never mind! on we go, faster and faster; Lizzy obliged to be
+most ignobly carried, having had the misfortune to lose a shoe in
+the mud, which we left the boy to look after.
+
+Here we are at home--dripping; but glowing and laughing, and bearing
+our calamity most manfully.  May, a dog of excellent sense, went
+instantly to bed in the stable, and is at this moment over head and
+ears in straw; Lizzy is gone to bed too, coaxed into that wise
+measure by a promise of tea and toast, and of not going home till
+to-morrow, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood; and I am
+enjoying the luxury of dry clothing by a good fire.  Really getting
+wet through now and then is no bad thing, finery apart; for one
+should not like spoiling a new pelisse, or a handsome plume; but
+when there is nothing in question but a white gown and a straw
+bonnet, as was the case to-day, it is rather pleasant than not.  The
+little chill refreshes, and our enjoyment of the subsequent warmth
+and dryness is positive and absolute.  Besides, the stimulus and
+exertion do good to the mind as well as body.  How melancholy I was
+all the morning! how cheerful I am now!  Nothing like a shower-bath-
+-a real shower-bath, such as Lizzy and May and I have undergone, to
+cure low spirits.  Try it, my dear readers, if ever ye be nervous--I
+will answer for its success.
+
+
+
+THE OLD HOUSE AT ABERLEIGH.
+
+June 25th.--What a glowing glorious day!  Summer in its richest
+prime, noon in its most sparkling brightness, little white clouds
+dappling the deep blue sky, and the sun, now partially veiled, and
+now bursting through them with an intensity of light!  It would not
+do to walk to-day, professedly to walk,--we should be frightened at
+the very sound! and yet it is probable that we may be beguiled into
+a pretty long stroll before we return home.  We are going to drive
+to the old house at Aberleigh, to spend the morning under the shade
+of those balmy firs, and amongst those luxuriant rose trees, and by
+the side of that brimming Loddon river.  'Do not expect us before
+six o'clock,' said I, as I left the house;  'Six at soonest!' added
+my charming companion; and off we drove in our little pony chaise,
+drawn by our old mare, and with the good humoured urchin, Henry's
+successor, a sort of younger Scrub, who takes care of horse and
+chaise, and cow and garden, for our charioteer.
+
+My comrade in this homely equipage was a young lady of high family
+and higher endowments, to whom the novelty of the thing, and her own
+naturalness of character and simplicity of taste, gave an
+unspeakable enjoyment.  She danced the little chaise up and down as
+she got into it, and laughed for very glee like a child, Lizzy
+herself could not have been more delighted.  She praised the horse
+and the driver, and the roads and the scenery, and gave herself
+fully up to the enchantment of a rural excursion in the sweetest
+weather of this sweet season.  I enjoyed all this too; for the road
+was pleasant to every sense, winding through narrow lanes, under
+high elms, and between hedges garlanded with woodbine and rose
+trees, whilst the air was scented with the delicious fragrance of
+blossomed beans.  I enjoyed it all,--but, I believe, my principal
+pleasure was derived from my companion herself.
+
+Emily I. is a person whom it is a privilege to know.  She is quite
+like a creation of the older poets, and might pass for one of
+Shakspeare's or Fletcher's women stepped into life; just as tender,
+as playful, as gentle, and as kind.  She is clever too, and has all
+the knowledge and accomplishments that a carefully-conducted
+education, acting on a mind of singular clearness and ductility,
+matured and improved by the very best company, can bestow.  But one
+never thinks of her acquirements.  It is the charming artless
+character, the bewitching sweetness of manner, the real and
+universal sympathy, the quick taste and the ardent feeling, that one
+loves in Emily.  She is Irish by birth, and has in perfection the
+melting voice and soft caressing accent by which her fair
+countrywomen are distinguished.  Moreover she is pretty--I think her
+beautiful, and so do all who have heard as well as seen her,--but
+pretty, very pretty, all the world must confess; and perhaps that is
+a distinction more enviable, because less envied, than the 'palmy
+state' of beauty.  Her prettiness is of the prettiest kind--that of
+which the chief character is youthfulness.  A short but pleasing
+figure, all grace and symmetry, a fair blooming face, beaming with
+intelligence and good-humour; the prettiest little feet and the
+whitest hands in the world;--such is Emily I.
+
+She resides with her maternal grandmother, a venerable old lady,
+slightly shaken with the palsy; and when together (and they are so
+fondly attached to each other
+that they are seldom parted), it is one of the loveliest
+combinations of youth and age ever witnessed.  There is no seeing
+them without feeling an increase of respect and affection for both
+grandmother and granddaughter--always one of the tenderest and most
+beautiful of natural connections--as Richardson knew when he made
+such exquisite use of it in his matchless book.  I fancy that
+grandmamma Shirley must have been just such another venerable lady
+as Mrs. S., and our sweet Emily--Oh no! Harriet Byron is not half
+good enough for her!  There is nothing like her in the whole seven
+volumes.
+
+But here we are at the bridge!  Here we must alight!  'This is the
+Loddon, Emily.  Is it not a beautiful river? rising level with its
+banks, so clear, and smooth, and peaceful, giving back the verdant
+landscape and the bright blue sky, and bearing on its pellucid
+stream the snowy water-lily, the purest of flowers, which sits
+enthroned on its own cool leaves, looking chastity itself, like the
+lady in Comus.  That queenly flower becomes the water, and so do the
+stately swans who are sailing so majestically down the stream, like
+those who
+
+          "'On St. Mary's lake
+      Float double, swan and shadow."
+
+We must dismount here, and leave Richard to take care of our
+equipage under the shade of these trees, whilst we walk up to the
+house:--See, there it is!  We must cross this stile; there is no
+other way now.'
+
+And crossing the stile we were immediately in what had been a drive
+round a spacious park, and still retained something of the
+character, though the park itself had long been broken into arable
+fields,--and in full view of the Great House, a beautiful structure
+of James the First's time, whose glassless windows and dilapidated
+doors form a melancholy contrast with the strength and entireness of
+the rich and massive front.
+
+The story of that ruin--for such it is--is always to me singularly
+affecting.  It is that of the decay of an ancient and distinguished
+family, gradually reduced from the highest wealth and station to
+actual poverty.  The house and park, and a small estate around it,
+were entailed on a distant cousin, and could not be alienated; and
+the late owner, the last of his name and lineage, after long
+struggling with debt and difficulty, farming his own lands, and
+clinging to his magnificent home with a love of place almost as
+tenacious as that of the younger Foscari, was at last forced to
+abandon it, retired to a paltry lodging in a paltry town, and died
+there about twenty years ago, broken-hearted.  His successor, bound
+by no ties of association to the spot, and rightly judging the
+residence to be much too large for the diminished estate,
+immediately sold the superb fixtures, and would have entirely taken
+down the house, if, on making the attempt, the masonry had not been
+found so solid that the materials were not worth the labour.  A
+great part, however, of one side is laid open, and the splendid
+chambers, with their carving and gilding, are exposed to the wind
+and rain--sad memorials of past grandeur!  The grounds have been
+left in a merciful neglect; the park, indeed, is broken up, the lawn
+mown twice a year like a common hayfield, the grotto mouldering into
+ruin, and the fishponds choked with rushes and aquatic plants; but
+the shrubs and flowering trees are undestroyed, and have grown into
+a magnificence of size and wildness of beauty, such as we may
+imagine them to attain in their native forests.  Nothing can exceed
+their luxuriance, especially in the spring, when the lilac, and
+laburnum, and double-cherry put forth their gorgeous blossoms.
+There is a sweet sadness in the sight of such floweriness amidst
+such desolation; it seems the triumph of nature over the destructive
+power of man.  The whole place, in that season more particularly, is
+full of a soft and soothing melancholy, reminding me, I scarcely
+know why, of some of the descriptions of natural scenery in the
+novels of Charlotte Smith, which I read when a girl, and which,
+perhaps, for that reason hang on my memory.
+
+But here we are, in the smooth grassy ride, on the top of a steep
+turfy slope descending to the river, crowned with enormous firs and
+limes of equal growth, looking across the winding waters into a
+sweet peaceful landscape of quiet meadows, shut in by distant woods.
+What a fragrance is in the air from the balmy fir trees and the
+blossomed limes!  What an intensity of odour!  And what a murmur of
+bees in the lime trees!  What a coil those little winged people make
+over our heads!  And what a pleasant sound it is! the pleasantest of
+busy sounds, that which comes associated with all that is good and
+beautiful--industry and forecast, and sunshine and flowers.  Surely
+these lime trees might store a hundred hives; the very odour is of a
+honeyed richness, cloying, satiating.
+
+Emily exclaimed in admiration as we stood under the deep, strong,
+leafy shadow, and still more when honeysuckles trailed their
+untrimmed profusion in our path, and roses, really trees, almost
+intercepted our passage.
+
+'On, Emily! farther yet!  Force your way by that jessamine--it will
+yield; I will take care of this stubborn white rose bough.'--'Take
+care of yourself!  Pray take care,' said my fairest friend; 'let me
+hold back the branches.'-- After we had won our way through the
+strait, at some expense of veils and flounces, she stopped to
+contemplate and admire the tall, graceful shrub, whose long thorny
+stems, spreading in every direction, had opposed our progress, and
+now waved their delicate clusters over our heads.  'Did I ever
+think,' exclaimed she, 'of standing under the shadow of a white rose
+tree!  What an exquisite fragrance!  And what a beautiful flower! so
+pale, and white, and tender, and the petals thin and smooth as silk!
+What rose is it?'--'Don't you know?  Did you never see it before?
+It is rare now, I believe, and seems rarer than it is, because it
+only blossoms in very hot summers; but this, Emily, is the musk
+rose,--that very musk rose of which Titania talks, and which is
+worthy of Shakspeare and of her.  Is it not?--No! do not smell to
+it; it is less sweet so than other roses; but one cluster in a vase,
+or even that bunch in your bosom, will perfume a large room, as it
+does the summer air.'--'Oh! we will take twenty clusters,' said
+Emily.  'I wish grandmamma were here!  She talks so often of a musk
+rose tree that grew against one end of her father's house.  I wish
+she were here to see this!'
+
+Echoing her wish, and well laden with musk roses, planted perhaps in
+the days of Shakspeare, we reached the steps that led to a square
+summer-house or banqueting-room, overhanging the river:  the under
+part was a boat-house, whose projecting roof, as well as the walls
+and the very top of the little tower, was covered with ivy and
+woodbine, and surmounted by tufted barberries, bird cherries,
+acacias, covered with their snowy chains, and other pendent and
+flowering trees.  Beyond rose two poplars of unrivalled magnitude,
+towering like stately columns over the dark tall firs, and giving a
+sort of pillared and architectural grandeur to the scene.
+
+We were now close to the mansion; but it looked sad and desolate,
+and the entrance, choked with brambles and nettles, seemed almost to
+repel our steps.  The summer-house, the beautiful summer-house, was
+free and open, and inviting, commanding from the unglazed windows,
+which hung high above the water, a reach of the river terminated by
+a rustic mill.
+
+There we sat, emptying our little basket of fruit and country cakes,
+till Emily was seized with a desire of viewing, from the other side
+of the Loddon, the scenery which had so much enchanted her.  'I
+must,' said she, 'take a sketch of the ivied boat-house, and of this
+sweet room, and this pleasant window;--grandmamma would never be
+able to walk from the road to see the place itself, but she must see
+its likeness.'  So forth we sallied, not forgetting the dear musk
+roses.
+
+We had no way of reaching the desired spot but by retracing our
+steps a mile, during the heat of the hottest hour of the day, and
+then following the course of the river to an equal distance on the
+other side; nor had we any materials for sketching, except the
+rumpled paper which had contained our repast, and a pencil without a
+point which I happened to have about me.  But these small
+difficulties are pleasures to gay and happy youth.  Regardless of
+such obstacles, the sweet Emily bounded on like a fawn, and I
+followed delighting in her delight.  The sun went in, and the walk
+was delicious; a reviving coolness seemed to breathe over the water,
+wafting the balmy scent of the firs and limes; we found a point of
+view presenting the boat-house, the water, the poplars, and the
+mill, in a most felicitous combination; the little straw fruit
+basket made a capital table; and refreshed and sharpened and pointed
+by our trusty lacquey's excellent knife (your country boy is never
+without a good knife, it is his prime treasure), the pencil did
+double duty;--first in the skilful hands of Emily, whose faithful
+and spirited sketch does equal honour to the scene and to the
+artist, and then in the humbler office of attempting a faint
+transcript of my own impressions in the following sonnet:--
+
+     It was an hour of calmest noon, at day
+       Of ripest summer:  o'er the deep blue sky
+       White speckled clouds came sailing peacefully,
+     Half-shrouding in a chequer'd veil the ray
+     Of the sun, too ardent else,--what time we lay
+       By the smooth Loddon, opposite the high
+       Steep bank, which as a coronet gloriously
+     Wore its rich crest of firs and lime trees, gay
+       With their pale tassels; while from out a bower
+     Of ivy (where those column'd poplars rear
+       Their heads) the ruin'd boat-house, like a tower,
+     Flung its deep shadow on the waters clear.
+       My Emily! forget not that calm hour,
+     Nor that fair scene, by thee made doubly dear!
+
+
+
+THE HARD SUMMER.
+
+August 15th.--Cold, cloudy, windy, wet.  Here we are, in the midst
+of the dog-days, clustering merrily round the warm hearth like so
+many crickets, instead of chirruping in the green fields like that
+other merry insect the grasshopper; shivering under the influence of
+the Jupiter Pluvius of England, the watery St. Swithin; peering at
+that scarce personage the sun, when he happens to make his
+appearance, as intently as astronomers look after a comet, or the
+common people stare at a balloon; exclaiming against the cold
+weather, just as we used to exclaim against the warm.  'What a
+change from last year!' is the first sentence you hear, go where you
+may.  Everybody remarks it, and everybody complains of it; and yet
+in my mind it has its advantages, or at least its compensations, as
+everything in nature has, if we would only take the trouble to seek
+for them.
+
+Last year, in spite of the love which we are now pleased to profess
+towards that ardent luminary, not one of the sun's numerous admirers
+had courage to look him in the face:  there was no bearing the world
+till he had said 'Good-night' to it.  Then we might stir:  then we
+began to wake and to live.  All day long we languished under his
+influence in a strange dreaminess, too hot to work, too hot to read,
+too hot to write, too hot even to talk; sitting hour after hour in a
+green arbour, embowered in leafiness, letting thought and fancy
+float as they would.  Those day-dreams were pretty things in their
+way; there is no denying that.  But then, if one half of the world
+were to dream through a whole summer, like the sleeping Beauty in
+the wood, what would become of the other?
+
+The only office requiring the slightest exertion, which I performed
+in that warm weather, was watering my flowers.  Common sympathy
+called for that labour.  The poor things withered, and faded, and
+pined away; they almost, so to say, panted for draught.  Moreover,
+if I had not watered them myself, I suspect that no one else would;
+for water last year was nearly as precious hereabout as wine.  Our
+land-springs were dried up; our wells were exhausted; our deep ponds
+were dwindling into mud; and geese, and ducks, and pigs, and
+laundresses, used to look with a jealous and suspicious eye on the
+few and scanty half-buckets of that impure element, which my trusty
+lacquey was fain to filch for my poor geraniums and campanulas and
+tuberoses.  We were forced to smuggle them in through my faithful
+adherent's territories, the stable, to avoid lectures within doors
+and at last even that resource failed; my garden, my blooming
+garden, the joy of my eyes, was forced to go waterless like its
+neighbours, and became shrivelled, scorched, and sunburnt, like
+them.  It really went to my heart to look at it.
+
+On the other side of the house matters were still worse.  What a
+dusty world it was, when about sunset we became cool enough to creep
+into it!  Flowers in the court looking fit for a 'hortus siccus;'
+mummies of plants, dried as in an oven; hollyhocks, once pink,
+turned into Quakers; cloves smelling of dust.  Oh, dusty world!  May
+herself looked of that complexion; so did Lizzy; so did all the
+houses, windows, chickens, children, trees, and pigs in the village;
+so above all did the shoes.  No foot could make three plunges into
+that abyss of pulverised gravel, which had the impudence to call
+itself a hard road, without being clothed with a coat a quarter of
+an inch thick.  Woe to white gowns! woe to black!  Drab was your
+only wear.
+
+Then, when we were out of the street, what a toil it was to mount
+the hill, climbing with weary steps and slow upon the brown turf by
+the wayside, slippery, hot, and hard as a rock!  And then if we
+happened to meet a carriage coming along the middle of the road,--
+the bottomless middle,--what a sandy whirlwind it was!  What
+choking! what suffocation!  No state could be more pitiable, except
+indeed that of the travellers who carried this misery about with
+them.  I shall never forget the plight in which we met the coach one
+evening in last August, full an hour after its time, steeds and
+driver, carriage and passengers, all one dust.  The outsides, and
+the horses, and the coachman, seemed reduced to a torpid quietness,
+the resignation of despair.  They had left off trying to better
+their condition, and taken refuge in a wise and patient
+hopelessness, bent to endure in silence the extremity of ill.  The
+six insides, on the contrary, were still fighting against their
+fate, vainly struggling to ameliorate their hapless destiny.  They
+were visibly grumbling at the weather, scolding at the dust, and
+heating themselves like a furnace, by striving against the heat.
+How well I remember the fat gentleman without his coat, who was
+wiping his forehead, heaving up his wig, and certainly uttering that
+English ejaculation, which, to our national reproach, is the phrase
+of our language best known on the continent.  And that poor boy,
+red-hot, all in a flame, whose mamma, having divested her own person
+of all superfluous apparel, was trying to relieve his sufferings by
+the removal of his neckerchief--an operation which he resisted with
+all his might.  How perfectly I remember him, as well as the pale
+girl who sat opposite, fanning herself with her bonnet into an
+absolute fever!  They vanished after a while into their own dust;
+but I have them all before my eyes at this moment, a companion
+picture to Hogarth's 'Afternoon,' a standing lesson to the grumblers
+at cold summers.
+
+For my part, I really like this wet season.  It keeps us within, to
+be sure, rather more than is quite agreeable; but then we are at
+least awake and alive there, and the world out of doors is so much
+the pleasanter when we can get abroad.  Everything does well, except
+those fastidious bipeds, men and women; corn ripens, grass grows,
+fruit is plentiful; there is no lack of birds to eat it, and there
+has not been such a wasp-season these dozen years.  My garden wants
+no watering, and is more beautiful than ever, beating my old rival
+in that primitive art, the pretty wife of the little mason, out and
+out.  Measured with mine, her flowers are naught.  Look at those
+hollyhocks, like pyramids of roses; those garlands of the
+convolvulus major of all colours, hanging around that tall pole,
+like the wreathy hop-bine; those magnificent dusky cloves, breathing
+of the Spice Islands; those flaunting double dahlias; those splendid
+scarlet geraniums, and those fierce and warlike flowers the
+tiger-lilies.  Oh, how beautiful they are!  Besides, the weather
+clears sometimes--it has cleared this evening; and here are we,
+after a merry walk up the hill, almost as quick as in the winter,
+bounding lightly along the bright green turf of the pleasant common,
+enticed by the gay shouts of a dozen clear young voices, to linger
+awhile, and see the boys play at cricket.
+
+I plead guilty to a strong partiality towards that unpopular class
+of beings, country boys:  I have a large acquaintance amongst them,
+and I can almost say, that I know good of many and harm of none.  In
+general they are an open, spirited, good-humoured race, with a
+proneness to embrace the pleasures and eschew the evils of their
+condition, a capacity for happiness, quite unmatched in man, or
+woman, or a girl.  They are patient, too, and bear their fate as
+scape-goats (for all sins whatsoever are laid as matters of course
+to their door), whether at home or abroad, with amazing resignation
+and, considering the many lies of which they are the objects, they
+tell wonderfully few in return.  The worst that can be said of them
+is, that they seldom, when grown to man's estate, keep the promise
+of their boyhood; but that is a fault to come--a fault that may not
+come, and ought not to be anticipated.  It is astonishing how
+sensible they are to notice from their betters, or those whom they
+think such.  I do not speak of money, or gifts, or praise, or the
+more coarse and common briberies--they are more delicate courtiers;
+a word, a nod, a smile, or the mere calling of them by their names,
+is enough to ensure their hearts and their services.  Half a dozen
+of them, poor urchins, have run away now to bring us chairs from
+their several homes.  'Thank you, Joe Kirby!--you are always first--
+yes, that is just the place--I shall see everything there.  Have you
+been in yet, Joe?'--'No, ma'am!  I go in next.'--'Ah, I am glad of
+that--and now's the time.  Really that was a pretty ball of Jem
+Eusden's!--I was sure it would go to the wicket.  Run, Joe!  They
+are waiting for you.'  There was small need to bid Joe Kirby make
+haste; I think he is, next to a race-horse, or a greyhound, or a
+deer, the fastest creature that runs--the most completely alert and
+active.  Joe is mine especial friend, and leader of the 'tender
+juveniles,' as Joel Brent is of the adults.  In both instances this
+post of honour was gained by merit, even more remarkably so in Joe's
+case than in Joel's; for Joe is a less boy than many of his
+companions (some of whom are fifteeners and sixteeners, quite as
+tall and nearly as old as Tom Coper), and a poorer than all, as may
+be conjectured from the lamentable state of that patched round
+frock, and the ragged condition of those unpatched shoes, which
+would encumber, if anything could, the light feet that wear them.
+But why should I lament the poverty that never troubles him?  Joe is
+the merriest and happiest creature that ever lived twelve years in
+this wicked world.  Care cannot come near him.  He hath a perpetual
+smile on his round ruddy face, and a laugh in his hazel eye, that
+drives the witch away.  He works at yonder farm on the top of the
+hill, where he is in such repute for intelligence and good-humour,
+that he has the honour of performing all the errands of the house,
+of helping the maid, the mistress, and the master, in addition to
+his own stated office of carter's boy.  There he works hard from
+five till seven, and then he comes here to work still harder, under
+the name of play--batting, bowling, and fielding, as if for life,
+filling the place of four boys; being, at a pinch, a whole eleven.
+The late Mr. Knyvett, the king's organist, who used in his own
+person to sing twenty parts at once of the Hallelujah Chorus, so
+that you would have thought he had a nest of nightingales in his
+throat, was but a type of Joe Kirby.  There is a sort of ubiquity
+about him; he thinks nothing of being in two places at once, and for
+pitching a ball, William Grey himself is nothing to him.  It goes
+straight to the mark like a bullet.  He is king of the cricketers
+from eight to sixteen, both inclusive, and an excellent ruler he
+makes.  Nevertheless, in the best-ordered states there will be
+grumblers, and we have an opposition here in the shape of Jem
+Eusden.
+
+Jem Eusden is a stunted lad of thirteen, or thereabout, lean, small,
+and short, yet strong and active.  His face is of an extraordinary
+ugliness, colourless, withered, haggard, with a look of extreme age,
+much increased by hair so light that it might rather pass for white
+than flaxen.  He is constantly arrayed in the blue cap and
+old-fashioned coat, the costume of an endowed school to which he
+belongs; where he sits still all day, and rushes into the field at
+night, fresh, untired, and ripe for action, to scold and brawl, and
+storm, and bluster.  He hates Joe Kirby, whose immovable
+good-humour, broad smiles, and knowing nods, must certainly be very
+provoking to so fierce and turbulent a spirit; and he has himself
+(being, except by rare accident, no great player) the preposterous
+ambition of wishing to be manager of the sports.  In short, he is a
+demagogue in embryo, with every quality necessary to a splendid
+success in that vocation,--a strong voice, a fluent utterance, an
+incessant iteration, and a frontless impudence.  He is a great
+'scholar' too, to use the country phrase; his 'piece,' as our
+village schoolmaster terms a fine sheet of flourishing writing,
+something between a valentine and a sampler, enclosed within a
+border of little coloured prints--his last, I remember, was
+encircled by an engraved history of Moses, beginning at the finding
+in the bulrushes, with Pharaoh's daughter dressed in a rose-coloured
+gown and blue feathers--his piece is not only the admiration of the
+school, but of the parish, and is sent triumphantly round from house
+to house at Christmas, to extort halfpence and sixpences from all
+encouragers of learning--Montem in miniature.  The Mosaic history
+was so successful, that the produce enabled Jem to purchase a bat
+and ball, which, besides adding to his natural arrogance (for the
+little pedant actually began to mutter against being eclipsed by a
+dunce, and went so far as to challenge Joe Kirby to a trial in
+Practice, or the Rule of Three), gave him, when compared with the
+general poverty, a most unnatural preponderance in the cricket
+state.  He had the ways and means in his hands (for alas! the hard
+winter had made sad havoc among the bats, and the best ball was a
+bad one)--he had the ways and means, could withhold the supplies,
+and his party was beginning to wax strong, when Joe received a
+present of two bats and a ball for the youngsters in general and
+himself in particular--and Jem's adherents left him on the spot--
+they ratted, to a man, that very evening.  Notwithstanding this
+desertion, their forsaken leader has in nothing relaxed from his
+pretensions, or his ill-humour.  He stills quarrels and brawls as if
+he had a faction to back him, and thinks nothing of contending with
+both sides, the ins and the outs, secure of out-talking the whole
+field.  He has been squabbling these ten minutes, and is just
+marching off now with his own bat (he has never deigned to use one
+of Joe's) in his hand.  What an ill-conditioned hobgoblin it is!
+And yet there is something bold and sturdy about him too.  I should
+miss Jem Eusden.
+
+Ah, there is another deserter from the party! my friend the little
+hussar--I do not know his name, and call him after his cap and
+jacket.  He is a very remarkable person, about the age of eight
+years, the youngest piece of gravity and dignity I ever encountered;
+short, and square, and upright, and slow, with a fine bronzed flat
+visage, resembling those convertible signs the Broad-Face and the
+Saracen's-Head, which, happening to be next-door neighbours in the
+town of B., I never knew apart, resembling, indeed, any face that is
+open-eyed and immovable, the very sign of a boy!  He stalks about
+with his hands in his breeches pockets, like a piece of machinery;
+sits leisurely down when he ought to field, and never gets farther
+in batting than to stop the ball.  His is the only voice never heard
+in the melee:  I doubt, indeed, if he have one, which may be partly
+the reason of a circumstance that I record to his honour, his
+fidelity to Jem Eusden, to whom he has adhered through every change
+of fortune, with a tenacity proceeding perhaps from an instinctive
+consciousness that the loquacious leader talks enough for two.  He
+is the only thing resembling a follower that our demagogue
+possesses, and is cherished by him accordingly.  Jem quarrels for
+him, scolds for him, pushes for him; and but for Joe Kirby's
+invincible good-humour, and a just discrimination of the innocent
+from the guilty, the activity of Jem's friendship would get the poor
+hussar ten drubbings a day.
+
+But it is growing late.  The sun has set a long time.  Only see what
+a gorgeous colouring has spread itself over those parting masses of
+clouds in the west,--what a train of rosy light!  We shall have a
+fine sunshiny day to-morrow,--a blessing not to be undervalued, in
+spite of my late vituperation of heat.  Shall we go home now?  And
+shall we take the longest but prettiest road, that by the green
+lanes?  This way, to the left, round the corner of the common, past
+Mr. Welles's cottage, and our path lies straight before us.  How
+snug and comfortable that cottage looks!  Its little yard all alive
+with the cow, and the mare, and the colt almost as large as the
+mare, and the young foal, and the great yard-dog, all so fat!
+Fenced in with hay-rick, and wheat-rick, and bean-stack, and backed
+by the long garden, the spacious drying-ground, the fine orchard,
+and that large field quartered into four different crops.  How
+comfortable this cottage looks, and how well the owners earn their
+comforts!  They are the most prosperous pair in the parish--she a
+laundress with twenty times more work than she can do, unrivalled in
+flounces and shirt-frills, and such delicacies of the craft; he,
+partly a farmer, partly a farmer's man, tilling his own ground, and
+then tilling other people's;--affording a proof, even in this
+declining age, when the circumstances of so many worthy members of
+the community seem to have 'an alacrity in sinking,' that it is
+possible to amend them by sheer industry.  He, who was born in the
+workhouse, and bred up as a parish boy, has now, by mere manual
+labour, risen to the rank of a land-owner, pays rates and taxes,
+grumbles at the times, and is called Master Welles,--the title next
+to Mister--that by which Shakspeare was called;--what would man have
+more?  His wife, besides being the best laundress in the county, is
+a comely woman still.  There she stands at the spring, dipping up
+water for to-morrow,--the clear, deep, silent spring, which sleeps
+so peacefully under its high flowery bank, red with the tall spiral
+stalks of the foxglove and their rich pendent bells, blue with the
+beautiful forget-me-not, that gem-like blossom, which looks like a
+living jewel of turquoise and topaz.  It is almost too late to see
+its beauty; and here is the pleasant shady lane, where the high elms
+will shut out the little twilight that remains.  Ah, but we shall
+have the fairies' lamps to guide us, the stars of the earth, the
+glow-worms!  Here they are, three almost together.  Do you not see
+them?  One seems tremulous, vibrating, as if on the extremity of a
+leaf of grass; the others are deeper in the hedge, in some green
+cell on which their light falls with an emerald lustre.  I hope my
+friends the cricketers will not come this way home.  I would not
+have the pretty creatures removed for more than I care to say, and
+in this matter I would hardly trust Joe Kirby--boys so love to stick
+them in their hats.  But this lane is quite deserted.  It is only a
+road from field to field.  No one comes here at this hour.  They are
+quite safe; and I shall walk here to-morrow and visit them again.
+And now, goodnight! beautiful insects, lamps of the fairies,
+good-night!
+
+
+
+THE SHAW.
+
+September 9th.--A bright sunshiny afternoon.  What a comfort it is
+to get out again--to see once more that rarity of rarities, a fine
+day!  We English
+people are accused of talking overmuch of the weather; but the
+weather, this summer, has forced people to talk of it.  Summer! did
+I say?  Oh! season most unworthy of that sweet, sunny name!  Season
+of coldness and cloudiness, of gloom and rain!  A worse November!--
+for in November the days are short; and shut up in a warm room,
+lighted by that household sun, a lamp, one feels through the long
+evenings comfortably independent of the out-of-door tempests.  But
+though we may have, and did have, fires all through the dog-days,
+there is no shutting out daylight; and sixteen hours of rain,
+pattering against the windows and dripping from the eaves--sixteen
+hours of rain, not merely audible, but visible for seven days in the
+week--would be enough to exhaust the patience of Job or Grizzel;
+especially if Job were a farmer, and Grizzel a country gentlewoman.
+Never was known such a season!  Hay swimming, cattle drowning, fruit
+rotting, corn spoiling! and that naughty river, the Loddon, who
+never can take Puff's advice, and 'keep between its banks,' running
+about the country, fields, roads, gardens, and houses, like mad!
+The weather would be talked of.  Indeed, it was not easy to talk of
+anything else.  A friend of mine having occasion to write me a
+letter, thought it worth abusing in rhyme, and bepommelled it
+through three pages of Bath-guide verse; of which I subjoin a
+specimen:--
+
+  'Aquarius surely REIGNS over the world,
+  And of late he his water-pot strangely has twirl'd;
+  Or he's taken a cullender up by mistake,
+  And unceasingly dips it in some mighty lake;
+  Though it is not in Lethe--for who can forget
+  The annoyance of getting most thoroughly wet?
+  It must be in the river called Styx, I declare,
+  For the moment it drizzles it makes the men swear.
+  "It did rain to-morrow," is growing good grammar;
+  Vauxhall and camp-stools have been brought to the hammer;
+  A pony-gondola is all I can keep,
+  And I use my umbrella and pattens in sleep:
+  Row out of my window, whene'er 'tis my whim
+  To visit a friend, and just ask, "Can you swim?"'
+
+So far my friend.*  In short, whether in prose or in verse,
+everybody railed at the weather.  But this is over now.  The sun has
+come to dry the world; mud is turned into dust; rivers have
+retreated to their proper limits; farmers have left off grumbling;
+and we are about to take a walk, as usual, as far as the Shaw, a
+pretty wood about a mile off.  But one of our companions being a
+stranger to the gentle reader, we must do him the honour of an
+introduction.
+
+*This friend of mine is a person of great quickness and talent, who,
+if she were not a beauty and a woman of fortune--that is to say, if
+she were prompted by either of those two powerful stimuli, want of
+money or want of admiration, to take due pains--would inevitably
+become a clever writer.  As it is, her notes and 'jeux d'esprit'
+struck off 'a trait de plume,' have great point and neatness.  Take
+the following billet, which formed the label to a closed basket,
+containing the ponderous present alluded to, last Michaelmas day:--
+
+          'To Miss M.
+     "When this you see
+        Remember me,"
+    Was long a phrase in use;
+      And so I send
+      To you, dear friend,
+    My proxy, "What?"--A goose!'
+
+
+Dogs, when they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes
+ways as odd as those of the unfurred, unfeathered animals, who walk
+on two legs, and talk, and are called rational.  My beautiful white
+greyhound, Mayflower,* for instance, is as whimsical as the finest
+lady in the land.  Amongst her other fancies, she has taken a
+violent affection for a most hideous stray dog, who made his
+appearance here about six months ago, and contrived to pick up a
+living in the village, one can hardly tell how.  Now appealing to
+the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laundress--a dog-lover by
+profession; now winning a meal from the lightfooted and open-hearted
+lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hind-legs, to extort by
+sheer beggary a scanty morsel from some pair of 'drouthy cronies,'
+or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the
+alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure
+contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on
+his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of
+ugliness; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker's
+pigs; now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of
+Master Brown the shopkeeper's fierce house-dog; now filching the
+skim-milk of Dame Wheeler's cat:--spit at by the cat; worried by the
+mastiff; chased by the pigs; screamed at by the dame; stormed at by
+the shoemaker; flogged by the shopkeeper; teased by all the
+children, and scouted by all the animals of the parish;--but yet
+living through his griefs, and bearing them patiently, 'for
+sufferance is the badge of all his tribe;'--and even seeming to
+find, in an occasional full meal, or a gleam of sunshine, or a wisp
+of dry straw on which to repose his sorry carcase, some comfort in
+his disconsolate condition.
+
+*Dead, alas, since this was written.
+
+In this plight was he found by May, the most high-blooded and
+aristocratic of greyhounds; and from this plight did May rescue
+him;--invited him into her territory, the stable; resisted all
+attempts to turn him out; reinstated him there, in spite of maid and
+boy, and mistress and master; wore out everybody's opposition, by
+the activity of her protection, and the pertinacity of her
+self-will; made him sharer of her bed and of her mess; and, finally,
+established him as one of the family as firmly as herself.
+
+Dash--for he has even won himself a name amongst us, before he was
+anonymous--Dash is a sort of a kind of a spaniel; at least there is
+in his mongrel composition some sign of that beautiful race.
+Besides his ugliness, which is of the worst sort--that is to say,
+the shabbiest--he has a limp on one leg that gives a peculiar
+one-sided awkwardness to his gait; but independently of his great
+merit in being May's pet, he has other merits which serve to account
+for that phenomenon--being, beyond all comparison, the most
+faithful, attached, and affectionate animal that I have ever known;
+and that is saying much.  He seems to think it necessary to atone
+for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his
+lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one who has
+a taste for happiness good to look at him--so that he may now be
+said to stand on his own footing.  We are all rather ashamed of him
+when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain
+that he is May's pet; but amongst ourselves, and those who are used
+to his appearance, he has reached the point of favouritism in his
+own person.  I have, in common with wiser women, the feminine
+weakness of loving whatever loves me--and, therefore, I like Dash.
+His master has found out that he is a capital finder, and in spite
+of his lameness will hunt a field or beat a cover with any spaniel
+in England--and, therefore, HE likes Dash.  The boy has fought a
+battle, in defence of his beauty, with another boy, bigger than
+himself, and beat his opponent most handsomely--and, therefore, HE
+likes Dash; and the maids like him, or pretend to like him, because
+we do--as is the fashion of that pliant and imitative class.  And
+now Dash and May follow us everywhere, and are going with us to the
+Shaw, as I said before--or rather to the cottage by the Shaw, to
+bespeak milk and butter of our little dairy-woman, Hannah Bint--a
+housewifely occupation, to which we owe some of our pleasantest
+rambles.
+
+And now we pass the sunny, dusty village street--who would have
+thought, a month ago, that we should complain of sun and dust
+again!--and turn the corner where the two great oaks hang so
+beautifully over the clear deep pond, mixing their cool green
+shadows with the bright blue sky, and the white clouds that flit
+over it; and loiter at the wheeler's shop, always picturesque, with
+its tools, and its work, and its materials, all so various in form,
+and so harmonious in colour; and its noise, merry workmen, hammering
+and singing, and making a various harmony also.  The shop is rather
+empty to-day, for its usual inmates are busy on the green beyond the
+pond--one set building a cart, another painting a waggon.  And then
+we leave the village quite behind, and proceed slowly up the cool,
+quiet lane, between tall hedgerows of the darkest verdure,
+overshadowing banks green and fresh as an emerald.
+
+Not so quick as I expected, though--for they are shooting here
+to-day, as Dash and I have both discovered:  he with great delight,
+for a gun to him is as a trumpet to a war-horse; I with no less
+annoyance, for I don't think that a partridge itself, barring the
+accident of being killed, can be more startled than I at that
+abominable explosion.  Dash has certainly better blood in his veins
+than any one would guess to look at him.  He even shows some
+inclination to elope into the fields, in pursuit of those noisy
+iniquities.  But he is an orderly person after all, and a word has
+checked him.
+
+Ah! here is a shriller din mingling with the small artillery--a
+shriller and more continuous.  We are not yet arrived within sight
+of Master Weston's cottage, snugly hidden behind a clump of elms;
+but we are in full hearing of Dame Weston's tongue, raised as usual
+to scolding pitch.  The Westons are new arrivals in our
+neighbourhood, and the first thing heard of them was a complaint
+from the wife to our magistrate of her husband's beating her:  it
+was a regular charge of assault--an information in full form.  A
+most piteous case did Dame Weston make of it, softening her voice
+for the nonce into a shrill tremulous whine, and exciting the
+mingled pity and anger--pity towards herself, anger towards her
+husband--of the whole female world, pitiful and indignant as the
+female world is wont to be on such occasions.  Every woman in the
+parish railed at Master Weston; and poor Master Weston was summoned
+to attend the bench on the ensuing Saturday, and answer the charge;
+and such was the clamour abroad and at home, that the unlucky
+culprit, terrified at the sound of a warrant and a constable, ran
+away, and was not heard of for a fortnight.
+
+At the end of that time he was discovered, and brought to the bench;
+and Dame Weston again told her story, and, as before, on the full
+cry.  She had no witnesses, and the bruises of which she made
+complaint had disappeared, and there were no women present to make
+common cause with the sex.  Still, however, the general feeling was
+against Master Weston; and it would have gone hard with him when he
+was called in, if a most unexpected witness had not risen up in his
+favour.  His wife had brought in her arms a little girl about
+eighteen months old, partly perhaps to move compassion in her
+favour; for a woman with a child in her arms is always an object
+that excites kind feelings.  The little girl had looked shy and
+frightened, and had been as quiet as a lamb during her mother's
+examination; but she no sooner saw her father, from whom she had
+been a fortnight separated, than she clapped her hands, and laughed,
+and cried, 'Daddy! daddy!' and sprang into his arms, and hung round
+his neck, and covered him with kisses--again shouting, 'Daddy, come
+home! daddy! daddy!'--and finally nestled her little head in his
+bosom, with a fulness of contentment, an assurance of tenderness and
+protection such as no wife-beating tyrant ever did inspire, or ever
+could inspire, since the days of King Solomon.  Our magistrates
+acted in the very spirit of the Jewish monarch:  they accepted the
+evidence of nature, and dismissed the complaint.  And subsequent
+events have fully justified their decision; Mistress Weston proving
+not only renowned for the feminine accomplishment of scolding
+(tongue-banging, it is called in our parts, a compound word which
+deserves to be Greek), but is actually herself addicted to
+administering the conjugal discipline, the infliction of which she
+was pleased to impute to her luckless husband.
+
+Now we cross the stile, and walk up the fields to the Shaw.  How
+beautifully green this pasture looks! and how finely the evening sun
+glances between the boles of that clump of trees, beech, and ash,
+and aspen! and how sweet the hedgerows are with woodbine and wild
+scabious, or, as the country people call it, the gipsy-rose!  Here
+is little Dolly Weston, the unconscious witness, with cheeks as red
+as a real rose, tottering up the path to meet her father.  And here
+is the carroty-poled urchin, George Coper, returning from work, and
+singing 'Home! sweet Home!' at the top of his voice; and then, when
+the notes prove too high for him, continuing the air in a whistle,
+until he has turned the impassable corner; then taking up again the
+song and the words, 'Home! sweet Home!' and looking as if he felt
+their full import, ploughboy though he be.  And so he does; for he
+is one of a large, an honest, a kind, and an industrious family,
+where all goes well, and where the poor ploughboy is sure of finding
+cheerful faces and coarse comforts--all that he has learned to
+desire.  Oh, to be as cheaply and as thoroughly contented as George
+Coper!  All his luxuries a cricket-match!--all his wants satisfied
+in 'home! sweet home!'
+
+Nothing but noises to-day!  They are clearing Farmer Brooke's great
+bean-field, and crying the 'Harvest Home!' in a chorus, before which
+all other sounds--the song, the scolding, the gunnery--fade away,
+and become faint echoes.  A pleasant noise is that! though, for
+one's ears' sake, one makes some haste to get away from it.  And
+here, in happy time, is that pretty wood, the Shaw, with its broad
+pathway, its tangled dingles, its nuts and its honeysuckles;--and,
+carrying away a faggot of those sweetest flowers, we reach Hannah
+Bint's:  of whom, and of whose doings, we shall say more another
+time.
+
+NOTE.--Poor Dash is also dead.  We did not keep him long, indeed I
+believe that he died of the transition from starvation to good feed,
+as dangerous to a dog's stomach, and to most stomachs, as the less
+agreeable change from good feed to starvation.  He has been
+succeeded in place and favour by another Dash, not less amiable in
+demeanour and far more creditable in appearance, bearing no small
+resemblance to the pet spaniel of my friend Master Dinely, he who
+stole the bone from the magpies, and who figures as the first Dash
+of this volume.  Let not the unwary reader opine, that in assigning
+the same name to three several individuals, I am acting as an humble
+imitator of the inimitable writer who has given immortality to the
+Peppers and the Mustards, on the one hand; or showing a poverty of
+invention or a want of acquaintance with the bead-roll of canine
+appellations on the other.  I merely, with my usual scrupulous
+fidelity, take the names as I find them.  The fact is that half the
+handsome spaniels in England are called Dash, just as half the tall
+footmen are called Thomas.  The name belongs to the species.
+Sitting in an open carriage one day last summer at the door of a
+farmhouse where my father had some business, I saw a noble and
+beautiful animal of this kind lying in great state and laziness on
+the steps, and felt an immediate desire to make acquaintance with
+him.  My father, who had had the same fancy, had patted him and
+called him 'poor fellow' in passing, without eliciting the smallest
+notice in return.  'Dash!' cried I at a venture, 'good Dash! noble
+Dash!' and up he started in a moment, making but one spring from the
+door into the gig.  Of course I was right in my guess.  The
+gentleman's name was Dash.
+
+
+
+NUTTING.
+
+September 26th.--One of those delicious autumnal days, when the air,
+the sky, and the earth seem lulled into a universal calm, softer and
+milder even than May.  We sallied forth for a walk, in a mood
+congenial to the weather and the season, avoiding, by mutual
+consent, the bright and sunny common, and the gay highroad, and
+stealing through shady, unfrequented lanes, where we were not likely
+to meet any one,--not even the pretty family procession which in
+other years we used to contemplate with so much interest--the
+father, mother, and children, returning from the wheat-field, the
+little ones laden with bristling close-tied bunches of wheat-ears,
+their own gleanings, or a bottle and a basket which had contained
+their frugal dinner, whilst the mother would carry her babe hushing
+and lulling it, and the father and an elder child trudged after with
+the cradle, all seeming weary and all happy.  We shall not see such
+a procession as this to-day; for the harvest is nearly over, the
+fields are deserted, the silence may almost be felt.  Except the
+wintry notes of the redbreast, nature herself is mute.  But how
+beautiful, how gentle, how harmonious, how rich!  The rain has
+preserved to the herbage all the freshness and verdure of spring,
+and the world of leaves has lost nothing of its midsummer
+brightness, and the harebell is on the banks, and the woodbine in
+the hedges, and the low furze, which the lambs cropped in the
+spring, has burst again into its golden blossoms.
+
+All is beautiful that the eye can see; perhaps the more beautiful
+for being shut in with a forest-like closeness.  We have no prospect
+in this labyrinth of lanes, cross-roads, mere cart-ways, leading to
+the innumerable little farms into which this part of the parish is
+divided.  Up-hill or down, these quiet woody lanes scarcely give us
+a peep at the world, except when, leaning over a gate, we look into
+one of the small enclosures, hemmed in with hedgerows, so closely
+set with growing timber, that the meady opening looks almost like a
+glade in a wood; or when some cottage, planted at a corner of one of
+the little greens formed by the meeting of these cross-ways, almost
+startles us by the unexpected sight of the dwellings of men in such
+a solitude.  But that we have more of hill and dale, and that our
+cross-roads are excellent in their kind, this side of our parish
+would resemble the description given of La Vendee, in Madame
+Laroche-Jacquelin's most interesting book.*  I am sure if wood can
+entitle a country to be called Le Bocage, none can have a better
+right to the name.  Even this pretty snug farmhouse on the hillside,
+with its front covered with the rich vine, which goes wreathing up
+to the very top of the clustered chimney, and its sloping orchard
+full of fruit--even this pretty quiet nest can hardly peep out of
+its leaves.  Ah! they are gathering in the orchard harvest.  Look at
+that young rogue in the old mossy apple-tree--that great tree,
+bending with the weight of its golden-rennets--see how he pelts his
+little sister beneath with apples as red and as round as her own
+cheeks, while she, with her outstretched frock, is trying to catch
+them, and laughing and offering to pelt again as often as one bobs
+against her; and look at that still younger imp, who, as grave as a
+judge, is creeping on hands and knees under the tree, picking up the
+apples as they fall so deedily,** and depositing them so honestly in
+the great basket on the grass, already fixed so firmly and opened so
+widely, and filled almost to overflowing by the brown rough fruitage
+of the golden-rennet's next neighbour the russeting; and see that
+smallest urchin of all, seated apart in infantine state on the turfy
+bank, with that toothsome piece of deformity a crumpling in each
+hand, now biting from one sweet, hard, juicy morsel and now from
+another--Is not that a pretty English picture?  And then, farther up
+the orchard, that bold hardy lad, the eldest born, who has scaled
+(Heaven knows how) the tall, straight upper branch of that great
+pear-tree, and is sitting there as securely and as fearlessly, in as
+much real safety and apparent danger, as a sailor on the top-mast.
+Now he shakes the tree with a mighty swing that brings down a
+pelting shower of stony bergamots, which the father gathers rapidly
+up, whilst the mother can hardly assist for her motherly fear--a
+fear which only spurs the spirited boy to bolder ventures.  Is not
+that a pretty picture?  And they are such a handsome family too, the
+Brookers.  I do not know that there is any gipsy blood, but there is
+the true gipsy complexion, richly brown, with cheeks and lips so
+red, black hair curling close to their heads in short crisp rings,
+white shining teeth--and such eyes!--That sort of beauty entirely
+eclipses your mere roses and lilies.  Even Lizzy, the prettiest of
+fair children, would look poor and watery by the side of Willy
+Brooker, the sober little personage who is picking up the apples
+with his small chubby hands, and filling the basket so orderly, next
+to his father the most useful man in the field.  'Willy!'  He hears
+without seeing; for we are quite hidden by the high bank, and a
+spreading hawthorn bush that overtops it, though between the lower
+branches and the grass we have found a convenient peep-hole.
+'Willy!'  The voice sounds to him like some fairy dream, and the
+black eyes are raised from the ground with sudden wonder, the long
+silky eyelashes thrown back till they rest on the delicate brow, and
+a deeper blush is burning on those dark cheeks, and a smile is
+dimpling about those scarlet lips.  But the voice is silent now, and
+the little quiet boy, after a moment's pause, is gone coolly to work
+again.  He is indeed a most lovely child.  I think some day or other
+he must marry Lizzy; I shall propose the match to their respective
+mammas.  At present the parties are rather too young for a wedding--
+the intended bridegroom being, as I should judge, six, or
+thereabout, and the fair bride barely five,--but at least we might
+have a betrothment after the royal fashion,--there could be no harm
+in that.  Miss Lizzy, I have no doubt, would be as demure and
+coquettish as if ten winters more had gone over her head, and poor
+Willy would open his innocent black eyes, and wonder what was going
+forward.  They would be the very Oberon and Titania of the village,
+the fairy king and queen.
+
+*An almost equally interesting account of that very peculiar and
+interesting scenery, may be found in The Maid of La Vendee, an
+English novel, remarkable for its simplicity and truth of painting,
+written by Mrs. Le Noir, the daughter of Christopher Smart, an
+inheritrix of much of his talent.  Her works deserve to be better
+known.
+
+**'Deedily,'--I am not quite sure that this word is good English;
+but it is genuine Hampshire, and is used by the most correct of
+female writers, Miss Austen.  It means (and it is no small merit
+that it has no exact synonym) anything done with a profound and
+plodding attention, an action which engrosses all the powers of mind
+and body.
+
+Ah! here is the hedge along which the periwinkle wreathes and twines
+so profusely, with its evergreen leaves shining like the myrtle, and
+its starry blue flowers.  It is seldom found wild in this part of
+England; but, when we do meet with it, it is so abundant and so
+welcome,--the very robin-redbreast of flowers, a winter friend.
+Unless in those unfrequent frosts which destroy all vegetation, it
+blossoms from September to June, surviving the last lingering
+crane's-bill, forerunning the earliest primrose, hardier even than
+the mountain daisy,--peeping out from beneath the snow, looking at
+itself in the ice, smiling through the tempests of life, and yet
+welcoming and enjoying the sunbeams.  Oh, to be like that flower!
+
+The little spring that has been bubbling under the hedge all along
+the hillside, begins, now that we have mounted the eminence and are
+imperceptibly descending, to deviate into a capricious variety of
+clear deep pools and channels, so narrow and so choked with weeds,
+that a child might overstep them.  The hedge has also changed its
+character.  It is no longer the close compact vegetable wall of
+hawthorn, and maple, and brier-roses, intertwined with bramble and
+woodbine, and crowned with large elms or thickly-set saplings.  No!
+the pretty meadow which rises high above us, backed and almost
+surrounded by a tall coppice, needs no defence on our side but its
+own steep bank, garnished with tufts of broom, with pollard oaks
+wreathed with ivy, and here and there with long patches of hazel
+overhanging the water.  'Ah, there are still nuts on that bough!'
+and in an instant my dear companion, active and eager and delighted
+as a boy, has hooked down with his walking-stick one of the lissome
+hazel stalks, and cleared it of its tawny clusters, and in another
+moment he has mounted the bank, and is in the midst of the nuttery,
+now transferring the spoil from the lower branches into that vast
+variety of pockets which gentlemen carry about them, now bending the
+tall tops into the lane, holding them down by main force, so that I
+might reach them and enjoy the pleasure of collecting some of the
+plunder myself.  A very great pleasure he knew it would be.  I
+doffed my shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into
+a basket, and began gathering and scrambling--for, manage it how you
+may, nutting is scrambling work,--those boughs, however tightly you
+may grasp them by the young fragrant twigs and the bright green
+leaves, will recoil and burst away; but there is a pleasure even in
+that:  so on we go, scrambling and gathering with all our might and
+all our glee.  Oh, what an enjoyment!  All my life long I have had a
+passion for that sort of seeking which implies finding (the secret,
+I believe, of the love of field-sports, which is in man's mind a
+natural impulse)--therefore I love violeting,--therefore, when we
+had a fine garden, I used to love to gather strawberries, and cut
+asparagus, and above all, to collect the filberts from the
+shrubberies:  but this hedgerow nutting beats that sport all to
+nothing.  That was a make-believe thing, compared with this; there
+was no surprise, no suspense, no unexpectedness--it was as inferior
+to this wild nutting, as the turning out of a bag-fox is to
+unearthing the fellow, in the eyes of a staunch foxhunter.
+
+Oh, what enjoyment this nut-gathering is!  They are in such
+abundance, that it seems as if there were not a boy in the parish,
+nor a young man, nor a young woman,--for a basket of nuts is the
+universal tribute of country gallantry; our pretty damsel Harriet
+has had at least half a dozen this season; but no one has found out
+these.  And they are so full too, we lose half of them from
+over-ripeness; they drop from the socket at the slightest motion.
+If we lose, there is one who finds.  May is as fond of nuts as a
+squirrel, and cracks the shell and extracts the kernel with equal
+dexterity.  Her white glossy head is upturned now to watch them as
+they fall.  See how her neck is thrown back like that of a swan, and
+how beautifully her folded ears quiver with expectation, and how her
+quick eye follows the rustling noise, and her light feet dance and
+pat the ground, and leap up with eagerness, seeming almost sustained
+in the air, just as I have seen her when Brush is beating a
+hedgerow, and she knows from his questing that there is a hare
+afoot.  See, she has caught that nut just before it touched the
+water; but the water would have been no defence,--she fishes them
+from the bottom, she delves after them amongst the matted grass--
+even my bonnet--how beggingly she looks at that!  'Oh, what a
+pleasure nutting is!--Is it not, May?  But the pockets are almost
+full, and so is the basket-bonnet, and that bright watch the sun
+says it is late; and after all it is wrong to rob the poor boys--is
+it not, May?'--May shakes her graceful head denyingly, as if she
+understood the question--'And we must go home now--must we not?  But
+we will come nutting again some time or other--shall we not, my
+May?'
+
+
+
+THE VISIT.
+
+October 27th.--A lovely autumnal day; the air soft, balmy, genial;
+the sky of that softened and delicate blue upon which the eye loves
+to rest,--the blue which gives such relief to the rich beauty of the
+earth, all around glowing in the ripe and mellow tints of the most
+gorgeous of the seasons.  Really such an autumn may well compensate
+our English climate for the fine spring of the south, that spring of
+which the poets talk, but which we so seldom enjoy.  Such an autumn
+glows upon us like a splendid evening; it is the very sunset of the
+year; and I have been tempted forth into a wider range of enjoyment
+than usual.  This WALK (if I may use the Irish figure of speech
+called a bull) will be a RIDE.  A very dear friend has beguiled me
+into accompanying her in her pretty equipage to her beautiful home,
+four miles off; and having sent forward in the style of a running
+footman the servant who had driven her, she assumes the reins, and
+off we set.
+
+My fair companion is a person whom nature and fortune would have
+spoiled if they could.  She is one of those striking women whom a
+stranger cannot pass without turning to look again; tall and finely
+proportioned, with a bold Roman contour of figure and feature, a
+delicate English complexion, and an air of distinction altogether
+her own.  Her beauty is duchess-like.  She seems born to wear
+feathers and diamonds, and to form the grace and ornament of a
+court; and the noble frankness and simplicity of her countenance and
+manner confirm the impression.  Destiny has, however, dealt more
+kindly by her.  She is the wife of a rich country gentleman of high
+descent and higher attainments, to whom she is most devotedly
+attached,--the mother of a little girl as lovely as herself, and the
+delight of all who have the happiness of her acquaintance, to whom
+she is endeared not merely by her remarkable sweetness of temper and
+kindness of heart, but by the singular ingenuousness and openness of
+character which communicate an indescribable charm to her
+conversation.  She is as transparent as water.  You may see every
+colour, every shade of a mind as lofty and beautiful as her person.
+Talking with her is like being in the Palace of Truth described by
+Madame de Genlis; and yet so kindly are her feelings, so great her
+indulgence to the little failings and foibles of our common nature,
+so intense her sympathy with the wants, the wishes, the sorrows, and
+the happiness of her fellow-creatures, that, with all her
+frank-speaking, I never knew her make an enemy or lose a friend.
+
+But we must get on.  What would she say if she knew I was putting
+her into print?  We must get on up the hill.  Ah! that is precisely
+what we are not likely to do!  This horse, this beautiful and
+high-bred horse, well-fed, and fat and glossy, who stood prancing at
+our gate like an Arabian, has suddenly turned sulky.  He does not
+indeed stand quite still, but his way of moving is little better--
+the slowest and most sullen of all walks.  Even they who ply the
+hearse at funerals, sad-looking beasts who totter under black
+feathers, go faster.  It is of no use to admonish him by whip, or
+rein, or word.  The rogue has found out that it is a weak and tender
+hand that guides him now.  Oh, for one pull, one stroke of his old
+driver, the groom! how he would fly!  But there is the groom half a
+mile before us, out of earshot, clearing the ground at a capital
+rate, beating us hollow.  He has just turned the top of the hill;--
+and in a moment--ay, NOW he is out of sight, and will undoubtedly so
+continue till he meets us at the lawn gate.  Well! there is no great
+harm.  It is only prolonging the pleasure of enjoying together this
+charming scenery in this fine weather.  If once we make up our minds
+not to care how slowly our steed goes, not to fret ourselves by vain
+exertions, it is no matter what his pace may be.  There is little
+doubt of his getting home by sunset, and that will content us.  He
+is, after all, a fine noble animal; and perhaps when he finds that
+we are determined to give him his way, he may relent and give us
+ours.  All his sex are sticklers for dominion, though, when it is
+undisputed, some of them are generous enough to abandon it.  Two or
+three of the most discreet wives of my acquaintance contrive to
+manage their husbands sufficiently with no better secret than this
+seeming submission; and in our case the example has the more weight
+since we have no possible way of helping ourselves.
+
+Thus philosophising, we reached the top of the hill, and viewed with
+'reverted eyes' the beautiful prospect that lay bathed in golden
+sunshine behind us.  Cowper says, with that boldness of expressing
+in poetry the commonest and simplest feelings, which is perhaps one
+great secret of his originality,
+
+     'Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily seen,
+      Please daily, and whose novelty survives
+      Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.'
+
+Every day I walk up this hill--every day I pause at the top to
+admire the broad winding road with the green waste on each side,
+uniting it with the thickly timbered hedgerows; the two pretty
+cottages at unequal distances, placed so as to mark the bends; the
+village beyond, with its mass of roofs and clustered chimneys
+peeping through the trees; and the rich distance, where cottages,
+mansions, churches, towns, seem embowered in some wide forest, and
+shut in by blue shadowy hills.  Every day I admire this most
+beautiful landscape; yet never did it seem to me so fine or so
+glowing as now.  All the tints of the glorious autumn, orange,
+tawny, yellow, red, are poured in profusion among the bright greens
+of the meadows and turnip fields, till the eyes are satiated with
+colour; and then before us we have the common with its picturesque
+roughness of surface tufted with cottages, dappled with water,
+edging off on one side into fields and farms and orchards, and
+terminated on the other by the princely oak avenue.  What a richness
+and variety the wild broken ground gives to the luxuriant
+cultivation of the rest of the landscape!  Cowper has described it
+for me.  How perpetually, as we walk in the country, his vivid
+pictures recur to the memory!  Here is his common and mine!
+
+     'The common overgrown with fern, and rough
+      With prickly gorse, that, shapeless and deform'd
+      And dangerous to the touch, has yet its bloom,
+      And decks itself with ornaments of gold;--
+      --------------- there the turf
+      Smells fresh, and, rich in odoriferous herbs
+      And fungous fruits of earth, regales the sense
+      With luxury of unexpected sweets.'
+
+The description is exact.  There, too, to the left is my
+cricket-ground (Cowper's common wanted that finishing grace); and
+there stands one solitary urchin, as if in contemplation of its past
+and future glories; for, alas! cricket is over for the season.  Ah!
+it is Ben Kirby, next brother to Joe, king of the youngsters, and
+probably his successor--for this Michaelmas has cost us Joe!  He is
+promoted from the farm to the mansion-house, two miles off; there he
+cleans shoes, rubs knives, and runs on errands, and is, as his
+mother expresses it, 'a sort of 'prentice to the footman.'  I should
+not wonder if Joe, some day or other, should overtop the footman,
+and rise to be butler; and his splendid prospects must be our
+consolation for the loss of this great favourite.  In the meantime
+we have Ben.
+
+Ben Kirby is a year younger than Joe, and the school-fellow and
+rival of Jem Eusden.  To be sure his abilities lie in rather a
+different line:  Jem is a scholar, Ben is a wag:  Jem is great in
+figures and writing, Ben in faces and mischief.  His master says of
+him, that, if there were two such in the school, he must resign his
+office; and as far as my observation goes, the worthy pedagogue is
+right.  Ben is, it must be confessed, a great corrupter of gravity.
+He hath an exceeding aversion to authority and decorum, and a
+wonderful boldness and dexterity in overthrowing the one and
+puzzling the other.  His contortions of visage are astounding.  His
+'power over his own muscles and those of other people' is almost
+equal to that of Liston; and indeed the original face, flat and
+square and Chinese in its shape, of a fine tan complexion, with a
+snub nose, and a slit for a mouth, is nearly as comical as that
+matchless performer's.  When aided by Ben's singular mobility of
+feature, his knowing winks and grins and shrugs and nods, together
+with a certain dry shrewdness, a habit of saying sharp things, and a
+marvellous gift of impudence, it forms as fine a specimen as
+possible of a humorous country boy, an oddity in embryo.  Everybody
+likes Ben, except his butts (which may perhaps comprise half his
+acquaintance); and of them no one so thoroughly hates and dreads him
+as our parish schoolmaster, a most worthy King Log, whom Ben
+dumbfounds twenty times a day.  He is a great ornament of the
+cricket-ground, has a real genius for the game, and displays it
+after a very original manner, under the disguise of awkwardness--as
+the clown shows off his agility in a pantomime.  Nothing comes amiss
+to him.  By the bye, he would have been the very lad for us in our
+present dilemma; not a horse in England could master Ben Kirby.  But
+we are too far from him now--and perhaps it is as well that we are
+so.  I believe the rogue has a kindness for me, in remembrance of
+certain apples and nuts, which my usual companion, who delights in
+his wit, is accustomed to dole out to him.  But it is a Robin
+Goodfellow nevertheless, a perfect Puck, that loves nothing on earth
+so well as mischief.  Perhaps the horse may be the safer conductor
+of the two.
+
+The avenue is quite alive to-day.  Old women are picking up twigs
+and acorns, and pigs of all sizes doing their utmost to spare them
+the latter part of the trouble; boys and girls groping for
+beech-nuts under yonder clump; and a group of younger elves
+collecting as many dead leaves as they can find to feed the bonfire
+which is smoking away so briskly amongst the trees,--a sort of
+rehearsal of the grand bonfire nine days hence; of the loyal
+conflagration of the arch-traitor Guy Vaux, which is annually
+solemnised in the avenue, accompanied with as much of squibbery and
+crackery as our boys can beg or borrow--not to say steal.  Ben Kirby
+is a great man on the 5th of November.  All the savings of a month,
+the hoarded halfpence, the new farthings, the very luck-penny, go
+off in fumo on that night.  For my part, I like this daylight
+mockery better.  There is no gunpowder--odious gunpowder! no noise
+but the merry shouts of the small fry, so shrill and happy, and the
+cawing of the rooks, who are wheeling in large circles overhead, and
+wondering what is going forward in their territory--seeming in their
+loud clamour to ask what that light smoke may mean that curls so
+prettily amongst their old oaks, towering as if to meet the clouds.
+There is something very intelligent in the ways of that black people
+the rooks, particularly in their wonder.  I suppose it results from
+their numbers and their unity of purpose, a sort of collective and
+corporate wisdom.  Yet geese congregate also; and geese never by any
+chance look wise.  But then geese are a domestic fowl; we have
+spoiled them; and rooks are free commoners of nature, who use the
+habitations we provide for them, tenant our groves and our avenues,
+but never dream of becoming our subjects.
+
+What a labyrinth of a road this is!  I do think there are four
+turnings in the short half-mile between the avenue and the mill.
+And what a pity, as my companion observes--not that our good and
+jolly miller, the very representative of the old English yeomanry,
+should be so rich, but that one consequence of his riches should be
+the pulling down of the prettiest old mill that ever looked at
+itself in the Loddon, with the picturesque, low-browed, irregular
+cottage, which stood with its light-pointed roof, its clustered
+chimneys, and its ever-open door, looking like the real abode of
+comfort and hospitality, to build this huge, staring, frightful,
+red-brick mill, as ugly as a manufactory, and this great square
+house, ugly and red to match, just behind.  The old buildings always
+used to remind me of Wollett's beautiful engraving of a scene in the
+Maid of the Mill.  It will be long before any artist will make a
+drawing of this.  Only think of this redness in a picture! this
+boiled lobster of a house!  Falstaff's description of Bardolph's
+nose would look pale in the comparison.
+
+Here is that monstrous machine of a tilted waggon, with its load of
+flour, and its four fat horses.  I wonder whether our horse will
+have the decency to get out of the way.  If he does not, I am sure
+we cannot make him; and that enormous ship upon wheels, that ark on
+dry land, would roll over us like the car of Juggernaut.  Really--Oh
+no! there is no danger now.  I should have remembered that it is my
+friend Samuel Long who drives the mill team.  He will take care of
+us. 'Thank you, Samuel!'  And Samuel has put us on our way, steered
+us safely past his waggon, escorted us over the bridge and now,
+having seen us through our immediate difficulties, has parted from
+us with a very civil bow and good-humoured smile, as one who is
+always civil and good-humoured, but with a certain triumphant
+masterful look in his eyes, which I have noted in men, even the best
+of them, when a woman gets into straits by attempting manly
+employments.  He has done us great good though, and may be allowed
+his little feeling of superiority.  The parting salute he bestowed
+on our steed, in the shape of an astounding crack of his huge whip,
+has put that refractory animal on his mettle.  On we go! past the
+glazier's pretty house, with its porch and its filbert walk; along
+the narrow lane bordered with elms, whose fallen leaves have made
+the road one yellow; past that little farmhouse with the
+horse-chestnut trees before, glowing like oranges; past the
+whitewashed school on the other side, gay with October roses; past
+the park, and the lodge, and the mansion, where once dwelt the great
+Earl of Clarendon;--and now the rascal has begun to discover that
+Samuel Long and his whip are a mile off, and that his mistress is
+driving him, and he slackens his pace accordingly.  Perhaps he feels
+the beauty of the road just here, and goes slowly to enjoy it.  Very
+beautiful it certainly is.  The park paling forms the boundary on
+one side, with fine clumps of oak, and deer in all attitudes; the
+water, tufted with alders, flowing along on the other.  Another
+turn, and the water winds away, succeeded by a low hedge, and a
+sweep of green meadows; whilst the park and its palings are replaced
+by a steep bank, on which stands a small, quiet, village alehouse;
+and higher up, embosomed in wood, is the little country church, with
+its sloping churchyard and its low white steeple, peeping out from
+amongst magnificent yew-trees:--
+
+     'Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
+      Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
+      Up-coiling, and invet'rately convolved.'
+                                           WORDSWORTH.
+
+No village church was ever more happily placed.  It is the very
+image of the peace and humbleness inculcated within its walls.
+
+Ah! here is a higher hill rising before us, almost like a mountain.
+How grandly the view opens as we ascend over that wild bank,
+overgrown with fern, and heath, and gorse, and between those tall
+hollies, glowing with their coral berries!  What an expanse!  But we
+have little time to gaze at present; for that piece of perversity,
+our horse, who has walked over so much level ground, has now,
+inspired, I presume, by a desire to revisit his stable, taken it
+into that unaccountable noddle of his to trot up this, the very
+steepest hill in the county.  Here we are on the top; and in five
+minutes we have reached the lawn gate, and are in the very midst of
+that beautiful piece of art or nature (I do not know to which class
+it belongs), the pleasure-ground of F. Hill.  Never was the
+'prophetic eye of taste' exerted with more magical skill than in
+these plantations.  Thirty years ago this place had no existence; it
+was a mere undistinguished tract of field and meadow and common
+land; now it is a mimic forest, delighting the eye with the finest
+combinations of trees and shrubs, the rarest effects of form and
+foliage, and bewildering the mind with its green glades, and
+impervious recesses, and apparently interminable extent.  It is the
+triumph of landscape gardening, and never more beautiful than in
+this autumn sunset, lighting up the ruddy beech and the spotted
+sycamore, and gilding the shining fir-cones that hang so thickly
+amongst the dark pines.  The robins are singing around us, as if
+they too felt the magic of the hour.  How gracefully the road winds
+through the leafy labyrinth, leading imperceptibly to the more
+ornamented sweep.  Here we are at the door amidst geraniums, and
+carnations, and jasmines, still in flower.  Ah! here is a flower
+sweeter than all, a bird gayer than the robin, the little bird that
+chirps to the tune of 'mamma! mamma!', the bright-faced fairy, whose
+tiny feet come pattering along, making a merry music, mamma's own
+Frances!  And following her guidance, here we are in the dear round
+room time enough to catch the last rays of the sun, as they light
+the noble landscape which lies like a panorama around us, lingering
+longest on that long island of old thorns and stunted oaks, the
+oasis of B. Heath, and then vanishing in a succession of gorgeous
+clouds.
+
+October 28th.--Another soft and brilliant morning.  But the
+pleasures of to-day must be written in shorthand.  I have left
+myself no room for notes of admiration.
+
+First we drove about the coppice:  an extensive wood of oak, and
+elm, and beech, chiefly the former, which adjoins the park-paling of
+F. Hill, of which demesne, indeed, it forms one of the most
+delightful parts.  The roads through the coppice are studiously
+wild; so that they have the appearance of mere cart-tracks:  and the
+manner in which the ground is tumbled about, the steep declivities,
+the sunny slopes, the sudden swells and falls, now a close narrow
+valley, then a sharp ascent to an eminence commanding an immense
+extent of prospect, have a striking air of natural beauty, developed
+and heightened by the perfection of art.  All this, indeed, was
+familiar to me; the colouring only was new.  I had been there in
+early spring, when the fragrant palms were on the willow, and the
+yellow tassels on the hazel, and every twig was swelling with
+renewed life; and I had been there again and again in the green
+leafiness of midsummer; but never as now, when the dark verdure of
+the fir-plantations, hanging over the picturesque and unequal
+paling, partly covered with moss and ivy, contrasts so remarkably
+with the shining orange-leaves of the beech, already half fallen,
+the pale yellow of the scattering elm, the deeper and richer tints
+of the oak, and the glossy stems of the 'lady of the woods,' the
+delicate weeping birch.  The underwood is no less picturesque.  The
+red-spotted leaves and redder berries of the old thorns, the scarlet
+festoons of the bramble, the tall fern of every hue, seem to vie
+with the brilliant mosaic of the ground, now covered with dead
+leaves and strewn with fir-cones, now, where a little glade
+intervenes, gay with various mosses and splendid fungi.  How
+beautiful is this coppice to-day! especially where the little
+spring, as clear as crystal, comes bubbling out from the old
+'fantastic' beech root, and trickles over the grass, bright and
+silent as the dew in a May morning.  The wood-pigeons (who are just
+returned from their summer migration, and are cropping the ivy
+berries) add their low cooings, the very note of love, to the slight
+fluttering of the falling leaves in the quiet air, giving a voice to
+the sunshine and the beauty.  This coppice is a place to live and
+die in.  But we must go.  And how fine is the ascent which leads us
+again into the world, past those cottages hidden as in a pit, and by
+that hanging orchard and that rough heathy bank!  The scenery in
+this one spot has a wildness, an abruptness of rise and fall, rare
+in any part of England, rare above all in this rich and lovely but
+monotonous county.  It is Switzerland in miniature.
+
+And now we cross the hill to pay a morning visit to the family at
+the great house,--another fine place, commanding another fine sweep
+of country.  The park, studded with old trees, and sinking gently
+into a valley, rich in wood and water, is in the best style of
+ornamental landscape, though more according to the common routine of
+gentlemen's seats than the singularly original place which we have
+just left.  There is, however, one distinctive beauty in the grounds
+of the great house;--the magnificent firs which shade the terraces
+and surround the sweep, giving out in summer odours really Sabaean,
+and now in this low autumn sun producing an effect almost magical,
+as the huge red trunks, garlanded with ivy, stand out from the deep
+shadows like an army of giants.  Indoors--Oh I must not take my
+readers indoors, or we shall never get away!  Indoors the sunshine
+is brighter still; for there, in a lofty, lightsome room, sat a
+damsel fair and arch and piquante, one whom Titian or Velasquez
+should be born again to paint, leaning over an instrument* as
+sparkling and fanciful as herself, singing pretty French romances,
+and Scottish Jacobite songs, and all sorts of graceful and airy
+drolleries picked up I know not where--an English improvisatrice! a
+gayer Annot Lyle! whilst her sister, of a higher order of beauty,
+and with an earnest kindness in her smile that deepens its power,
+lends to the piano, as her father to the violin, an expression, a
+sensibility, a spirit, an eloquence almost superhuman--almost
+divine!  Oh to hear these two instruments accompanying my dear
+companion (I forgot to say that she is a singer worthy to be so
+accompanied) in Haydn's exquisite canzonet, "She never told her
+love,"--to hear her voice, with all its power, its sweetness, its
+gush of sound, so sustained and assisted by modulations that
+rivalled its intensity of expression; to hear at once such poetry,
+such music, such execution, is a pleasure never to be forgotten, or
+mixed with meaner things.  I seem to hear it still.
+
+  As in the bursting spring time o'er the eye
+     Of one who haunts the fields fair visions creep
+     Beneath the closed lids (afore dull sleep
+  Dims the quick fancy) of sweet flowers that lie
+  On grassy banks, oxlip of orient dye,
+     And palest primrose and blue violet,
+     All in their fresh and dewy beauty set,
+  Pictured within the sense, and will not fly:
+  So in mine ear resounds and lives again
+     One mingled melody,--a voice, a pair
+     Of instruments most voice-like!  Of the air
+  Rather than of the earth seems that high strain,
+  A spirit's song, and worthy of the train
+     That soothed old Prospero with music rare.
+
+*The dital harp.
+
+
+
+HANNAH BINT.
+
+The Shaw, leading to Hannah Bint's habitation, is, as I perhaps have
+said before, a very pretty mixture of wood and coppice; that is to
+say, a tract of thirty or forty acres covered with fine growing
+timber--ash, and oak, and elm, very regularly planted; and
+interspersed here and there with large patches of underwood, hazel,
+maple, birch, holly, and hawthorn, woven into almost impenetrable
+thickets by long wreaths of the bramble, the briony, and the
+brier-rose, or by the pliant and twisting garlands of the wild
+honeysuckle.  In other parts, the Shaw is quite clear of its bosky
+undergrowth, and clothed only with large beds of feathery fern, or
+carpets of flowers, primroses, orchises, cowslips, ground-ivy,
+crane's-bill, cotton-grass, Solomon's seal, and forget-me-not,
+crowded together with a profusion and brilliancy of colour, such as
+I have rarely seen equalled even in a garden.  Here the wild
+hyacinth really enamels the ground with its fresh and lovely purple;
+there,
+
+     'On aged roots, with bright green mosses clad,
+      Dwells the wood-sorrel, with its bright thin leaves
+      Heart-shaped and triply folded, and its root
+      Creeping like beaded coral; whilst around
+      Flourish the copse's pride, anemones,
+      With rays like golden studs on ivory laid
+      Most delicate; but touch'd with purple clouds,
+      Fit crown for April's fair but changeful brow.'
+
+The variety is much greater than I have enumerated; for the ground
+is so unequal, now swelling in gentle ascents, now dimpling into
+dells and hollows, and the soil so different in different parts,
+that the sylvan Flora is unusually extensive and complete.
+
+The season is, however, now too late for this floweriness; and
+except the tufted woodbines, which have continued in bloom during
+the whole of this lovely autumn, and some lingering garlands of the
+purple wild vetch, wreathing round the thickets, and uniting with
+the ruddy leaves of the bramble, and the pale festoons of the
+briony, there is little to call one's attention from the grander
+beauties of the trees--the sycamore, its broad leaves already
+spotted--the oak, heavy with acorns--and the delicate shining rind
+of the weeping birch, 'the lady of the woods,' thrown out in strong
+relief from a background of holly and hawthorn, each studded with
+coral berries, and backed with old beeches, beginning to assume the
+rich tawny hue which makes them perhaps the most picturesque of
+autumnal trees, as the transparent freshness of their young foliage
+is undoubtedly the choicest ornament of the forest in spring.
+
+A sudden turn round one of these magnificent beeches brings us to
+the boundary of the Shaw, and leaning upon a rude gate, we look over
+an open space of about ten acres of ground, still more varied and
+broken than that which we have passed, and surrounded on all sides
+by thick woodland.  As a piece of colour, nothing can be well finer.
+The ruddy glow of the heath-flower, contrasting, on the one hand,
+with the golden-blossomed furze--on the other, with a patch of
+buck-wheat, of which the bloom is not past, although the grain be
+ripening, the beautiful buck-wheat, whose transparent leaves and
+stalks are so brightly tinged with vermilion, while the delicate
+pink-white of the flower, a paler persicaria, has a feathery fall,
+at once so rich and so graceful, and a fresh and reviving odour,
+like that of birch trees in the dew of a May evening.  The bank that
+surmounts this attempt at cultivation is crowned with the late
+foxglove and the stately mullein; the pasture of which so great a
+part of the waste consists, looks as green as an emerald; a clear
+pond, with the bright sky reflected in it, lets light into the
+picture; the white cottage of the keeper peeps from the opposite
+coppice; and the vine-covered dwelling of Hannah Bint rises from
+amidst the pretty garden, which lies bathed in the sunshine around
+it.
+
+The living and moving accessories are all in keeping with the
+cheerfulness and repose of the landscape.  Hannah's cow grazing
+quietly beside the keeper's pony; a brace of fat pointer puppies
+holding amicable intercourse with a litter of young pigs; ducks,
+geese, cocks, hens, and chickens scattered over the turf; Hannah
+herself sallying forth from the cottage-door, with her milk-bucket
+in her hand, and her little brother following with the
+milking-stool.
+
+My friend, Hannah Bint, is by no means an ordinary person.  Her
+father, Jack Bint (for in all his life he never arrived at the
+dignity of being called John, indeed in our parts he was commonly
+known by the cognomen of London Jack), was a drover of high repute
+in his profession.  No man, between Salisbury Plain and Smithfield,
+was thought to conduct a flock of sheep so skilfully through all the
+difficulties of lanes and commons, streets and high-roads, as Jack
+Bint, aided by Jack Bint's famous dog, Watch; for Watch's rough,
+honest face, black, with a little white about the muzzle, and one
+white ear, was as well known at fairs and markets as his master's
+equally honest and weather-beaten visage.  Lucky was the dealer that
+could secure their services; Watch being renowned for keeping a
+flock together better than any shepherd's dog on the road--Jack, for
+delivering them more punctually, and in better condition.  No man
+had a more thorough knowledge of the proper night stations, where
+good feed might be procured for his charge, and good liquor for
+Watch and himself; Watch, like other sheep dogs, being accustomed to
+live chiefly on bread and beer.  His master, though not averse to a
+pot of good double X, preferred gin; and they who plod slowly along,
+through wet and weary ways, in frost and in fog, have undoubtedly a
+stronger temptation to indulge in that cordial and reviving
+stimulus, than we water-drinkers, sitting in warm and comfortable
+rooms, can readily imagine.  For certain, our drover could never
+resist the gentle seduction of the gin-bottle, and being of a free,
+merry, jovial temperament, one of those persons commonly called good
+fellows, who like to see others happy in the same way with
+themselves, he was apt to circulate it at his own expense, to the
+great improvement of his popularity, and the great detriment of his
+finances.
+
+All this did vastly well whilst his earnings continued proportionate
+to his spendings, and the little family at home were comfortably
+supported by his industry:  but when a rheumatic fever came on, one
+hard winter, and finally settled in his limbs, reducing the most
+active and hardy man in the parish to the state of a confirmed
+cripple, then his reckless improvidence stared him in the face; and
+poor Jack, a thoughtless, but kind creature, and a most affectionate
+father, looked at his three motherless children with the acute
+misery of a parent who has brought those whom he loves best in the
+world to abject destitution.  He found help, where he probably least
+expected it, in the sense and spirit of his young daughter, a girl
+of twelve years old.
+
+Hannah was the eldest of the family, and had, ever since her
+mother's death, which event had occurred two or three years before,
+been accustomed to take the direction of their domestic concerns, to
+manage her two brothers, to feed the pigs and the poultry, and to
+keep house during the almost constant absence of her father.  She
+was a quick, clever lass, of a high spirit, a firm temper, some
+pride, and a horror of accepting parochial relief, which is every
+day becoming rarer amongst the peasantry; but which forms the surest
+safeguard to the sturdy independence of the English character.  Our
+little damsel possessed this quality in perfection; and when her
+father talked of giving up their comfortable cottage, and removing
+to the workhouse, whilst she and her brothers must go to service,
+Hannah formed a bold resolution, and without disturbing the sick man
+by any participation of her hopes and fears, proceeded after
+settling their trifling affairs to act at once on her own plans and
+designs.
+
+Careless of the future as the poor drover had seemed, he had yet
+kept clear of debt, and by subscribing constantly to a benefit club,
+had secured a pittance that might at least assist in supporting him
+during the long years of sickness and helplessness to which he was
+doomed to look forward.  This his daughter knew.  She knew also,
+that the employer in whose service his health had suffered so
+severely, was a rich and liberal cattle-dealer in the neighbourhood,
+who would willingly aid an old and faithful servant, and had,
+indeed, come forward with offers of money.  To assistance from such
+a quarter Hannah saw no objection.  Farmer Oakley and the parish
+were quite distinct things.  Of him, accordingly, she asked, not
+money, but something much more in his own way--'a cow! any cow! old
+or lame, or what not, so that it were a cow! she would be bound to
+keep it well; if she did not, he might take it back again.  She even
+hoped to pay for it by and by, by instalments, but that she would
+not promise!' and, partly amused, partly interested by the child's
+earnestness, the wealthy yeoman gave her, not as a purchase, but as
+a present, a very fine young Alderney.  She then went to the lord of
+the manor, and, with equal knowledge of character, begged his
+permission to keep her cow on the Shaw common.  'Farmer Oakley had
+given her a fine Alderney, and she would be bound to pay the rent,
+and keep her father off the parish, if he would only let it graze on
+the waste;' and he too, half from real good nature--half, not to be
+outdone in liberality by his tenant, not only granted the requested
+permission, but reduced the rent so much, that the produce of the
+vine seldom fails to satisfy their kind landlord.
+
+Now Hannah showed great judgment in setting up as a dairy-woman.
+She could not have chosen an occupation more completely unoccupied,
+or more loudly called for.  One of the most provoking of the petty
+difficulties which beset people with a small establishment in this
+neighbourhood, is the trouble, almost the impossibility, of
+procuring the pastoral luxuries of milk, eggs, and butter, which
+rank, unfortunately, amongst the indispensable necessaries of
+housekeeping.  To your thoroughbred Londoner, who, whilst grumbling
+over his own breakfast, is apt to fancy that thick cream, and fresh
+butter, and new-laid eggs, grow, so to say, in the country--form an
+actual part of its natural produce--it may be some comfort to learn,
+that in this great grazing district, however the calves and the
+farmers may be the better for cows, nobody else is; that farmers'
+wives have ceased to keep poultry; and that we unlucky villagers sit
+down often to our first meal in a state of destitution, which may
+well make him content with his thin milk and his Cambridge butter,
+when compared to our imputed pastoralities.
+
+Hannah's Alderney restored us to one rural privilege.  Never was so
+cleanly a little milkmaid.  She changed away some of the cottage
+finery, which, in his prosperous days, poor Jack had pleased himself
+with bringing home, the china tea-service, the gilded mugs, and the
+painted waiters, for the useful utensils of the dairy, and speedily
+established a regular and gainful trade in milk, eggs, butter,
+honey, and poultry--for poultry they had always kept.
+
+Her domestic management prospered equally.  Her father, who retained
+the perfect use of his hands, began a manufacture of mats and
+baskets, which he constructed with great nicety and adroitness; the
+eldest boy, a sharp and clever lad, cut for him his rushes and
+osiers; erected, under his sister's direction, a shed for the cow,
+and enlarged and cultivated the garden (always with the good leave
+of her kind patron the lord of the manor) until it became so ample,
+that the produce not only kept the pig, and half kept the family,
+but afforded another branch of merchandise to the indefatigable
+directress of the establishment.  For the younger boy, less quick
+and active, Hannah contrived to obtain an admission to the
+charity-school, where he made great progress--retaining him at home,
+however, in the hay-making and leasing season, or whenever his
+services could be made available, to the great annoyance of the
+schoolmaster, whose favourite he is, and who piques himself so much
+on George's scholarship (your heavy sluggish boy at country work
+often turns out quick at his book), that it is the general opinion
+that this much-vaunted pupil will, in process of time, be promoted
+to the post of assistant, and may, possibly, in course of years,
+rise to the dignity of a parish pedagogue in his own person; so that
+his sister, although still making him useful at odd times, now
+considers George as pretty well off her hands, whilst his elder
+brother, Tom, could take an under-gardener's place directly, if he
+were not too important at home to be spared even for a day.
+
+In short, during the five years that she has ruled at the Shaw
+cottage, the world has gone well with Hannah Bint.  Her cow, her
+calves, her pigs, her bees, her poultry, have each, in their several
+ways, thriven and prospered.  She has even brought Watch to like
+butter-milk, as well as strong beer, and has nearly persuaded her
+father (to whose wants and wishes she is most anxiously attentive)
+to accept of milk as a substitute for gin.  Not but Hannah hath had
+her enemies as well as her betters.  Why should she not?  The old
+woman at the lodge, who always piqued herself on being spiteful, and
+crying down new ways, foretold from the first she would come to no
+good, and could not forgive her for falsifying her prediction; and
+Betty Barnes, the slatternly widow of a tippling farmer, who rented
+a field, and set up a cow herself, and was universally discarded for
+insufferable dirt, said all that the wit of an envious woman could
+devise against Hannah and her Alderney; nay, even Ned Miles, the
+keeper, her next neighbour, who had whilom held entire sway over the
+Shaw common, as well as its coppices, grumbled as much as so
+good-natured and genial a person could grumble, when he found a
+little girl sharing his dominion, a cow grazing beside his pony, and
+vulgar cocks and hens hovering around the buck-wheat destined to
+feed his noble pheasants.  Nobody that had been accustomed to see
+that paragon of keepers, so tall and manly, and pleasant looking,
+with his merry eye, and his knowing smile, striding gaily along, in
+his green coat, and his gold-laced hat, with Neptune, his noble
+Newfoundland dog (a retriever is the sporting word), and his
+beautiful spaniel Flirt at his heels, could conceive how askew he
+looked, when he first found Hannah and Watch holding equal reign
+over his old territory, the Shaw common.
+
+Yes! Hannah hath had her enemies; but they are passing away.  The
+old woman at the lodge is dead, poor creature; and Betty Barnes,
+having herself taken to tippling, has lost the few friends she once
+possessed, and looks, luckless wretch, as if she would soon die
+too!--and the keeper?--why, he is not dead, or like to die; but the
+change that has taken place there is the most astonishing of all--
+except, perhaps, the change in Hannah herself.
+
+Few damsels of twelve years old, generally a very pretty age, were
+less pretty than Hannah Bint.  Short and stunted in her figure, thin
+in face, sharp in feature, with a muddled complexion, wild sunburnt
+hair, and eyes whose very brightness had in them something
+startling, over-informed, super-subtle, too clever for her age,--at
+twelve years old she had quite the air of a little old fairy.  Now,
+at seventeen, matters are mended.  Her complexion has cleared; her
+countenance has developed itself; her figure has shot up into height
+and lightness, and a sort of rustic grace; her bright, acute eye is
+softened and sweetened by the womanly wish to please; her hair is
+trimmed, and curled and brushed, with exquisite neatness; and her
+whole dress arranged with that nice attention to the becoming, the
+suitable both in form and texture, which would be called the highest
+degree of coquetry, if it did not deserve the better name of
+propriety.  Never was such a transmogrification beheld.  The lass is
+really pretty, and Ned Miles has discovered that she is so.  There
+he stands, the rogue, close at her side (for he hath joined her
+whilst we have been telling her little story, and the milking is
+over!)--there he stands--holding her milk-pail in one hand, and
+stroking Watch with the other; whilst she is returning the
+compliment by patting Neptune's magnificent head.  There they stand,
+as much like lovers as may be; he smiling, and she blushing--he
+never looking so handsome nor she so pretty in all their lives.
+There they stand, in blessed forgetfulness of all except each other;
+as happy a couple as ever trod the earth.  There they stand, and one
+would not disturb them for all the milk and butter in Christendom.
+I should not wonder if they were fixing the wedding day.
+
+
+
+THE FALL OF THE LEAF.
+
+November 6th.--The weather is as peaceful to-day, as calm, and as
+mild, as in early April; and, perhaps, an autumn afternoon and a
+spring morning do resemble each other more in feeling, and even in
+appearance, than any two periods of the year.  There is in both the
+same freshness and dewiness of the herbage; the same balmy softness
+in the air; and the same pure and lovely blue sky, with white fleecy
+clouds floating across it.  The chief difference lies in the absence
+of flowers, and the presence of leaves.  But then the foliage of
+November is so rich, and glowing, and varied, that it may well
+supply the place of the gay blossoms of the spring; whilst all the
+flowers of the field or the garden could never make amends for the
+want of leaves,--that beautiful and graceful attire in which nature
+has clothed the rugged forms of trees--the verdant drapery to which
+the landscape owes its loveliness, and the forests their glory.
+
+If choice must be between two seasons, each so full of charm, it is
+at least no bad philosophy to prefer the present good, even whilst
+looking gratefully back, and hopefully forward, to the past and the
+future.  And of a surety, no fairer specimen of a November day could
+well be found than this,--a day made to wander
+
+     'By yellow commons and birch-shaded hollows,
+      And hedgerows bordering unfrequented lanes;'
+
+nor could a prettier country be found for our walk than this shady
+and yet sunny Berkshire, where the scenery, without rising into
+grandeur or breaking into wildness, is so peaceful, so cheerful, so
+varied, and so thoroughly English.
+
+We must bend our steps towards the water side, for I have a message
+to leave at Farmer Riley's:  and sooth to say, it is no unpleasant
+necessity; for the road thither is smooth and dry, retired, as one
+likes a country walk to be, but not too lonely, which women never
+like; leading past the Loddon--the bright, brimming, transparent
+Loddon--a fitting mirror for this bright blue sky, and terminating
+at one of the prettiest and most comfortable farmhouses in the
+neighbourhood.
+
+How beautiful the lane is to-day, decorated with a thousand colours!
+The brown road, and the rich verdure that borders it, strewed with
+the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just beginning to fall; hedgerows
+glowing with long wreaths of the bramble in every variety of
+purplish red; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir,
+contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny beech, and the dry
+sere leaves of the oak, which rustle as the light wind passes
+through them; a few common hardy yellow flowers (for yellow is the
+common colour of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is the
+rare one), flowers of many sorts, but almost of one tint, still
+blowing in spite of the season, and ruddy berries glowing through
+all.  How very beautiful is the lane!
+
+And how pleasant is this hill where the road widens, with the group
+of cattle by the wayside, and George Hearn, the little post-boy,
+trundling his hoop at full speed, making all the better haste in his
+work, because he cheats himself into thinking it play!  And how
+beautiful, again, is this patch of common at the hilltop with the
+clear pool, where Martha Pither's children,--elves of three, and
+four, and five years old,--without any distinction of sex in their
+sunburnt faces and tattered drapery, are dipping up water in their
+little homely cups shining with cleanliness, and a small brown
+pitcher with the lip broken, to fill that great kettle, which, when
+it is filled, their united strength will never be able to lift!
+They are quite a group for a painter, with their rosy cheeks, and
+chubby hands, and round merry faces; and the low cottage in the
+background, peeping out of its vine leaves and china roses, with
+Martha at the door, tidy, and comely, and smiling, preparing the
+potatoes for the pot, and watching the progress of dipping and
+filling that useful utensil, completes the picture.
+
+But we must go on.  No time for more sketches in these short days.
+It is getting cold too.  We must proceed in our walk.  Dash is
+showing us the way and beating the thick double hedgerow that runs
+along the side of the meadows, at a rate that indicates game astir,
+and causes the leaves to fly as fast as an east-wind after a hard
+frost.  Ah! a pheasant! a superb cock pheasant!  Nothing is more
+certain than Dash's questing, whether in a hedgerow or covert, for a
+better spaniel never went into the field; but I fancied that it was
+a hare afoot, and was almost as much startled to hear the whirring
+of those splendid wings, as the princely bird himself would have
+been at the report of a gun.  Indeed, I believe that the way in
+which a pheasant goes off, does sometimes make young sportsmen a
+little nervous, (they don't own it very readily, but the observation
+may be relied on nevertheless), until they get as it were broken in
+to the sound; and then that grand and sudden burst of wing becomes
+as pleasant to them as it seems to be to Dash, who is beating the
+hedgerow with might and main, and giving tongue louder, and sending
+the leaves about faster than ever--very proud of finding the
+pheasant, and perhaps a little angry with me for not shooting it; at
+least looking as if he would be angry if I were a man; for Dash is a
+dog of great sagacity, and has doubtless not lived four years in the
+sporting world without making the discovery, that although gentlemen
+do shoot, ladies do not.
+
+The Loddon at last! the beautiful Loddon! and the bridge, where
+every one stops, as by instinct, to lean over the rails, and gaze a
+moment on a landscape of surpassing loveliness,--the fine grounds of
+the Great House, with their magnificent groups of limes, and firs,
+and poplars grander than ever poplars were; the green meadows
+opposite, studded with oaks and elms; the clear winding river; the
+mill with its picturesque old buildings, bounding the scene; all
+glowing with the rich colouring of autumn, and harmonised by the
+soft beauty of the clear blue sky, and the delicious calmness of the
+hour.  The very peasant whose daily path it is, cannot cross that
+bridge without a pause.
+
+But the day is wearing fast, and it grows colder and colder.  I
+really think it will be a frost.  After all, spring is the
+pleasantest season, beautiful as this scenery is.  We must get on.
+Down that broad yet shadowy lane, between the park, dark with
+evergreens and dappled with deer, and the meadows where sheep, and
+cows, and horses are grazing under the tall elms; that lane, where
+the wild bank, clothed with fern, and tufted with furze, and crowned
+by rich berried thorn, and thick shining holly on the one side,
+seems to vie in beauty with the picturesque old paling, the bright
+laurels, and the plumy cedars, on the other;--down that shady lane,
+until the sudden turn brings us to an opening where four roads meet,
+where a noble avenue turns down to the Great House; where the
+village church rears its modest spire from amidst its venerable yew
+trees:  and where, embosomed in orchards and gardens, and backed by
+barns and ricks, and all the wealth of the farmyard, stands the
+spacious and comfortable abode of good Farmer Riley,--the end and
+object of our walk.
+
+And in happy time the message is said and the answer given, for this
+beautiful mild day is edging off into a dense frosty evening; the
+leaves of the elm and the linden in the old avenue are quivering and
+vibrating and fluttering in the air, and at length falling crisply
+on the earth, as if Dash were beating for pheasants in the
+tree-tops; the sun gleams dimly through the fog, giving little more
+of light and heat than his fair sister the lady moon;--I don't know
+a more disappointing person than a cold sun; and I am beginning to
+wrap my cloak closely round me, and to calculate the distance to my
+own fireside, recanting all the way my praises of November, and
+longing for the showery, flowery April, as much as if I were a
+half-chilled butterfly, or a dahlia knocked down by the frost.
+
+Ah, dear me! what a climate this is, that one cannot keep in the
+same mind about it for half an hour together!  I wonder, by the way,
+whether the fault is in the weather, which Dash does not seem to
+care for, or in me?  If I should happen to be wet through in a
+shower next spring, and should catch myself longing for autumn, that
+would settle the question.
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText of Our Village.
diff --git a/old/vllg10.zip b/old/vllg10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0d42b9f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/vllg10.zip