The Wise Woman

The Wise Woman
by George MacDonald
1875
CHAPTER I.

THERE was a certain country where things used to go rather oddly. For
instance, you could never tell whether it was going to rain or hail, or
whether or not the milk was going to turn sour. It was impossible to say
whether the next baby would be a boy or a girl, or, even after he was a
week old, whether he would wake sweet-tempered or cross.
In strict accordance with the peculiar nature of this country of
uncertainties, it came to pass one day that, in the midst of a shower of
rain that might well be called golden, seeing the sun, shining as it fell,
turned all its drops into molten topazes, and every drop was good for a
grain of golden corn, or a yellow cowslip, or a buttercup, or a dandelion
at least,--while this splendid rain was falling, I say, with a musical
patter upon the great leaves of the horse-chestnuts, which hung like
Vandyke collars about the necks of the creamy, red-spotted blossoms,
and on the leaves of the sycamores, looking as if they had blood in their
veins, and on a multitude of flowers, of which some stood up and
boldly held out their cups to catch their share, while others cowered
down laughing under the soft patting blows of the heavy warm
drops;--while this lovely rain was washing all the air clean from the
motes, and the bad odours, and the poisonseeds that had escaped from
their prisons during the long drought--while it fell, splashing, and
sparkling, with a hum, and a rush, and a soft clashing--but stop--I am
stealing, I find, and not that only, but with clumsy hands spoiling what
I steal:--

"O Rain, with your dull two-fold sound,
The clash hard-by, and the murmur all round;"
--there! take it, Mr. Coleridge;--while, as I was saying, the lovely little
rivers whose fountains are the clouds, and which cut their own channels
through the air, and make sweet noises rubbing against their banks as
they hurry down and down, until at length they are pulled up on a
sudden, with a musical plash, in the very heart of an odorous flower,
that first gasps and then sighs up a blissful scent, or on the bald head of
a stone that never says thank you;--while the very sheep felt it blessing
them, though it could never reach their skins through the depth of their
long wool, and the veriest hedgehog--I mean the one with the longest
spikes--came and spiked himself out to impale as many of the drops as
he could,--while the rain was thus falling, and the leaves, and the
flowers, and the sheep, and the cattle, and the hedgehog, were all busily
receiving the golden rain, something happened. It was not a great battle,
nor an earthquake, nor a coronation, but something more important
than all those put together: a baby-girl was born--and her father was a
king, and her mother was a queen, and her uncles and aunts were
princes and princesses, and her first cousins were dukes and duchesses,
and not one of her second cousins was less than a marquis or
marchioness, or of her third cousins less than an earl or countess, and
below a countess they did not care to count. So the little girl was
Somebody; and yet for all that, strange to say, the first thing she did
was to cry! told you it was a strange country.
As she grew up, everybody about her did his best to convince her that
she was Somebody, and the girl herself was so easily persuaded of it
that she quite forgot that anybody had ever told her so, and took it for a
fundamental, innate, primary, firstborn, self-evident, necessary, and
incontrovertible idea and principle that she was Somebody. And far be
it from me to deny it! I will even go so far as to assert that in this odd
country there was a huge number of Somebodies. Indeed, it was one of
its oddities that every boy and girl in it was rather too ready to think he
or she was Somebody; and the worst of it was that the princess never
thought of there being more than one Somebody--and that was herself.

Far away to the north in the same country, on the side of a bleak hill,
where a horse-chestnut or a sycamore was never seen, where were no
meadows rich with buttercups, only steep, rough, breezy slopes,
covered with dry prickly furze and its flowers of red gold, or moister,
softer broom with its flowers of yellow gold, and great sweeps of
purple heather, mixed with bilberries, and crowberries, and
cranberries--no, I am all wrong--there was nothing out yet but a few
furze