C. KINGSLEY.

CHAPTER I--THE GLEN

You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge Flat this sad
November day? Well, I do not deny that the moor looks somewhat dreary,
though dull it need never be. Though the fog is clinging to the
fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till you cannot see as far as
Minley Corner, hardly as far as Bramshill woods--and all the Berkshire
hills are as invisible as if it was a dark midnight--yet there is plenty
to be seen here at our very feet. Though there is nothing left for you
to pick, and all the flowers are dead and brown, except here and there a
poor half-withered scrap of bottle-heath, and nothing left for you to
catch either, for the butterflies and insects are all dead too, except
one poor old Daddy-long-legs, who sits upon that piece of turf, boring a
hole with her tail to lay her eggs in, before the frost catches her and
ends her like the rest: though all things, I say, seem dead, yet there is
plenty of life around you, at your feet, I may almost say in the very
stones on which you tread. And though the place itself be dreary enough,
a sheet of flat heather and a little glen in it, with banks of dead fern,
and a brown bog between them, and a few fir-trees struggling up--yet, if
you only have eyes to see it, that little bit of glen is beautiful and
wonderful,--so beautiful and so wonderful and so cunningly devised, that
it took thousands of years to make it; and it is not, I believe, half
finished yet.

How do I know all that? Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who lives up
here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if people have but
eyes to see her. What is her name? I cannot tell. The best name that I
can give her (and I think it must be something like her real name,
because she will always answer if you call her by it patiently and
reverently) is Madam How. She will come in good time, if she is called,
even by a little child. And she will let us see her at her work, and,
what is more, teach us to copy her. But there is another fairy here
likewise, whom we can hardly hope to see. Very thankful should we be if
she lifted even the smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for a
moment if it were but her finger tip--so beautiful is she, and yet so
awful too. But that sight, I believe, would not make us proud, as if we
had had some great privilege. No, my dear child: it would make us feel
smaller, and meaner, and more stupid and