The Ground-Ash

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
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GROUND-ASH ***

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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
glorious, and we had driven through lanes perfumed by the fresh green
birch, with its bark silvery and many-tinted, and over commons where
the very air was loaded with the heavy fragrance of the furze, an odour
resembling in richness its golden blossoms, just as the scent of the
birch is cool, refreshing, and penetrating, like the exquisite colour of its
young leaves, until we reached the top of the hill, where, on one side,
the enclosed wood, where the lilies grow, sank gradually, in an
amphitheatre of natural terraces, to a piece of water at the bottom;
whilst on the other, the wild open heath formed a sort of promontory

overhanging a steep ravine, through which a slow and sluggish stream
crept along amongst stunted alders, until it was lost in the deep recesses
of Lidhurst Forest, over the tall trees of which we literally looked down.
We had come without a servant; and on arriving at the gate of the wood
with neither human figure nor human habitation in sight, and a
high-blooded and high-spirited horse in the phaeton, we began to feel
all the awkwardness of our situation. My companion, however, at
length espied a thin wreath of smoke issuing from a small clay-built hut
thatched with furze, built against the steepest part of the hill, of which
it seemed a mere excrescence, about half way down the declivity; and,
on calling aloud, two children, who had been picking up dry stumps of
heath and gorse, and collecting them in a heap for fuel at the door of
their hovel, first carefully deposited their little load, and then came
running to know what we wanted.
If we had wondered to see human beings living in a habitation, which,
both for space and appearance, would have been despised by a pig of
any pretension, as too small and too mean for his accommodation, so
we were again surprised at the strange union of poverty and content
evinced by the apparel and countenances of its young inmates. The
children, bareheaded and barefooted, and with little more clothing than
one shabby-looking garment, were yet as fine, sturdy, hardy, ruddy,
sunburnt urchins, as one should see on a summer day. They were clean,
too: the stunted bit of raiment was patched, but not ragged; and