so lonely, with nobody but the north wind taking the least
notice of it, and in May--in all those five lovely Mays--
no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more
wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing,
the virginia creeper madder every year, until at last,
in October, the very roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses,
the owls and the squirrels and all the blessed little birds
reigning supreme, and not a living creature ever entering
the empty house except the snakes, which got into the habit during
those silent years of wriggling up the south wall into the rooms
on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the windows.
All that was here,--peace, and happiness, and a reasonable life,--
and yet it never struck me to come and live in it.
Looking back I am astonished, and can in no way account for
the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this far-away corner,
was my kingdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it enter
my head to even use the place in summer, that I submitted
to weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every year;
until at last, in the early spring of last year, having come
down for the opening of the village school, and wandering out
afterwards into the bare and desolate garden, I don't know what
smell of wet earth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood
with a rush and all the happy days I had spent in a garden.
Shall I ever forget that day? It was the beginning of my real life,
my coming of age as it were, and entering into my kingdom.
Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth;
leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the damp
and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure
delight in the first breath of spring that I used to as a child,
and the five wasted years fell from me like a cloak, and the world