other. And the mill with its booming--the great chestnut-tree under
which they played at houses--their own little river, the Ripple, where
the banks seemed like home, and Tom was always seeing the water-rats,
while Maggie gathered the purple plumy tops of the reeds, which she
forgot and dropped afterward--above all, the great Floss, along which
they wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide,
the awful Eagre, come up like a hungry monster, or to see the Great Ash
which had once wailed and groaned like a man--these things would always
be just the same to them. Tom thought people were at a disadvantage who
lived on any other spot of the globe; and Maggie, when she read about
Christiana passing "the river over which there is no bridge," always saw
the Floss between the green pastures by the Great Ash.

Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in
believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always
make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if
we had had no childhood in it--if it were not the earth where the same
flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny
fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and
haws on the autumn hedgerows--the same red-breasts that we used to call
"God's birds," because they did no harm to the precious crops. What
novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and
_loved_ because it is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown
foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers,
and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at my feet--what grove
of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petaled blossoms,
could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this
home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes,
this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields,
each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious
hedgerows--such things as these are the mother tongue of our
imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable
associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our
delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more
than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the
sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in u