The Flight of the Shadow | Page 2

every time one of us utters the word! For
myself, I remember neither father nor mother, nor one of their fathers
or mothers: how little then can I say as to what I am! But I will tell as
much as most of my readers, if ever I have any, will care to know.
I come of a long yeoman-line of the name of Whichcote. In Scotland
the Whichcotes would have been called _lairds_; in England they were
not called squires. Repeatedly had younger sons of it risen to rank and
honour, and in several generations would his property have entitled the
head of the family to rank as a squire, but at the time when I began to
be aware of existence, the family possessions had dwindled to one large
farm, on which I found myself. Naturally, while some of the family had
risen, others had sunk in the social scale; and of the latter was Miss
Martha Moon, far more to my life than can appear in my story. I should
imagine there are few families in England covering a larger range of
social difference than ours. But I begin to think the chief difficulty in
writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.
I may mention, however, my conviction, that I owe many special
delights to the gradual development of my race in certain special
relations to the natural ways of the world. That I was myself brought up
in such relations, appears not enough to account for the intensity of my
pleasure in things belonging to simplest life--in everything of the open
air, in animals of all kinds, in the economy of field and meadow and
moor. I can no more understand my delight in the sweet breath of a cow,
than I can explain the process by which, that day in the garden--but I
must not forestall, and will say rather--than I can account for the tears

which, now I am an old woman, fill my eyes just as they used when I
was a child, at sight of the year's first primrose. A harebell, much as I
have always loved harebells, never moved me that way! Some will say
the cause, whatever it be, lies in my nature, not in my ancestry; that,
anyhow, it must have come first to some one--and why not to me? I
answer, Everything lies in everyone of us, but has to be brought to the
surface. It grows a little in one, more in that one's child, more in that
child's child, and so on and on--with curious breaks as of a river which
every now and then takes to an underground course. One thing I am
sure of--that, however any good thing came, I did not make it; I can
only be glad and thankful that in me it came to the surface, to tell me
how beautiful must he be who thought of it, and made it in me. Then
surely one is nearer, if not to God himself, yet to the things God loves,
in the country than amid ugly houses--things that could not have been
invented by God, though he made the man that made them. It is not the
fashionable only that love the town and not the country; the men and
women who live in dirt and squalor--their counterparts in this and
worse things far more than they think--are afraid of loneliness, and hate
God's lovely dark.

CHAPTER II
.
MISS MARTHA MOON.
Let me look back and see what first things I first remember!
All about my uncle first; but I keep him to the last. Next, all about
Rover, the dog--though for roving, I hardly remember him away from
my side! Alas, he did not live to come into the story, but I must
mention him here, for I shall not write another book, and, in the briefest
summary of my childhood, to make no allusion to him would be
disloyalty. I almost believe that at one period, had I been set to say who
I was, I should have included Rover as an essential part of myself. His
tail was my tail; his legs were my legs; his tongue was my tongue!--so
much more did I, as we gambolled together, seem conscious of his joy
than of my own! Surely, among other and greater mercies, I shall find
him again! The next person I see busy about the place, now here now
there in the house, and seldom outside it, is Miss Martha Moon. The

house is large, built at a time when the family was one of consequence,
and there was always much to be done in it. The largest room in it is
now called the kitchen, but was doubtless called the