The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ground-Ash, by Mary Russell Mitford

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Title: The Ground-Ash

Author: Mary Russell Mitford

Release Date: October 2, 2007 [EBook #22846]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GROUND-ASH ***

Produced by David Widger

THE GROUND-ASH

By Mary Russell Mitford

Amongst the many pleasant circumstances attendant on a love of
flowers--that sort of love which leads us into the woods for the
earliest primrose, or to the river side for the latest forget-me-not,
and carries us to the parching heath or the watery mere to procure for
the cultivated, or, if I may use the expression, the _tame_ beauties of
the parterre, the soil that they love; amongst the many gratifications
which such pursuits bring with them, such as seeing in the seasons in
which it shows best, the prettiest, coyest, most unhackneyed scenery,
and taking, with just motive enough for stimulus and for reward, drives
and walks which approach to fatigue, without being fatiguing; amongst
all the delights consequent on a love of flowers, I know none greater
than the half unconscious and wholly unintended manner in which such
expeditions make us acquainted with the peasant children of remote and
out-of-the-way regions, the inhabitants of the wild woodlands and still
wilder commons of the hilly part of the north of Hampshire, which forms
so strong a contrast with this sunny and populous county of Berks, whose
very fields are gay and neat as gardens, and whose roads are as level
and even as a gravel-walk.

Two of the most interesting of these flower-formed acquaintances, were
my little friends Harry and Bessy Leigh.

Every year I go to the Everley woods to gather wild lilies of the
valley. It is one of the delights that May--the charming, ay, and the
merry month of May, which I love as fondly as ever that bright and
joyous season was loved by our older poets--regularly brings in her
train; one of those rational pleasures in which (and it is the great
point of superiority over pleasures that are artificial and worldly)
there is no disappointment About four years ago, I made such a visit.
The day was glori