he morning she used to suck the honey from the sweet,
starry flowers of the jasmine that flung its green fountains over the
kitchen porch.

Summer went on; the hay was cut, and in the swimming July heat she used
to play in the meadows till her face grew freckled as the inside of a
cowslip. Now was the time when she could wear foxglove blooms on every
finger. Now was the time to watch the rabbits scampering by the wood's
edge in the warm dusk. The corn turned golden, and there were
expeditions for wild raspberries. The corn was cut, and blackberry time
arrived, bringing her mother, who was pleased to see how well Jenny
looked and went back to Hagworth Street with a great bunch of fat purple
dahlias.

In October there was nutting--best of all the new delights,
perhaps--when she wandered through the hazel coppices and shook the
smooth boughs until the ripe nuts pattered down on the damp, woodland
earth. Nutting was no roadside adventure. She really penetrated into the
heart of the woods and with her companions would peep out
half-affrighted by the lips of the October leaves along the glades,
half-afraid of the giant beeches with their bare gray branches twisted
to the likeness of faces and figures. She and her playmates would peep
out from the hazel coppice and dart across the mossy way out of the
keeper's eye, and lose themselves in the dense covert and point with
breathless whisper to a squirrel or scurrying dormouse. Home again in
the silvery mists or moaning winds, home again with bags of nuts slung
across shoulders, to await the long winter evenings and fireside
pleasures.

Jenny was allowed to celebrate her ninth birthday by a glorious
tea-party in the kitchen, when little girls in clean pinafores and
little boys in clean collars stumped along the flagged passage and sat
down to tea and munched buns and presented Jenny with dolls'
tea-services and pop-guns and Michaelmas daisies with stalks warm from
the tight clasp of warm hands.

She grew to love her Aunt Carrie and Uncle James with the quiet voice
and thin, damp hair.

Winter went by to the ticking of clocks and patter of rain. But there
was snow after Christmas and uproarious snow-balling and slides in
Galton High Street. There was always a fine crackling fire in the
kitchen, and a sleek tabby cat, and copper kettles singing on the hob.
There was Ethel's love affair with the grocer's assistant to talk and
giggle over amid the tinkle and clatter of washing