nd yet it never
struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I am astonished, and can
in no way account for the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this
far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it
enter my head to even use the place in summer, that I submitted to weeks
of seaside life with all its horrors every year; until at last, in
the early spring of last year, having come down for the opening of the
village school, and wandering out afterwards into the bare and desolate
garden, I don't know what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought
back my childhood with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a
garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was the beginning of my real
life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom. Early
March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and sad
and lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I stood
feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring
that I used to as a child, and the five wasted years fell from me like a
cloak, and the world was full of hope, and I vowed myself then and there
to nature, and have been happy ever since.

My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that
it might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it
at any rate for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks
from the end of April into June, during which I was here alone, supposed
to be superintending the painting and papering, but as a matter of fact
only going into the house when the workmen had gone out of it.

How happy I was! I don't remember any time quite so perfect since the
days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar
on my eleven o'clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with
dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its
charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now
than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I were
not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little
faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a
world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three
lawns,--they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into
meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,--and under and among the
groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones,
v