sink deep, but all summer there was water standing there. The
grass was long and very sweet, there were ferns and a few calamus
flowers, and there must have been an acre of cowslips--cowslips with
big-veined, heartshaped, green leaves, and large pale gold flowers. I
used to sit on the top rail of that orchard fence and look down at
them, and try to figure out what God was thinking when He created them,
and I wished that I might have been where I could watch His face as He
worked.

Halfway across the east side was a gully where Leon and I found the
Underground Station, and from any place along the north you looked, you
saw the Little Creek and the marsh. At the same time the cowslips were
most golden, the marsh was blue with flags, pink with smart weed, white
and yellow with dodder, yellow with marsh buttercups having ragged
frosty leaves, while the yellow and the red birds flashed above it, the
red crying, "Chip," "Chip," in short, sharp notes, the yellow spilling
music all over the marsh while on wing.

It would take a whole book to describe the butterflies; once in a while
you scared up a big, wonderful moth, large as a sparrow; and the
orchard was alive with doves, thrushes, catbirds, bluebirds, vireos,
and orioles. When you climbed the fence, or a tree, and kept quiet,
and heard the music and studied the pictures, it made you feel as if
you had to put it into words. I often had meeting all by myself,
unless Bobby and Hezekiah were along, and I tried to tell God what I
thought about things. Probably He was so busy making more birds and
flowers for other worlds, He never heard me; but I didn't say anything
disrespectful at all, so it made no difference if He did listen. It
just seemed as if I must tell what I thought, and I felt better, not so
full and restless after I had finished.

All of us were alike about that. At that minute I knew mother was
humming, as she did a dozen times a day:

"I think when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here among men
How He called little children as lambs to His fold,
I should like to have been with Him then."

Lucy would be rocking her baby and singing, "Hush, my dear, lie still
and slumber." Candace's favourite she made up about her man who had
been killed in the war, when they had been married only six weeks,
which hadn't given her time to grow tired of him if he hadn't been "all
her fancy painted." She arranged the words like "Ben Battl