window in a cloud. Even the most dreadful curtain of a winter's day was
always drawn up at sunset; its straight edge rose slowly, disclosing
flaming space, and the dramatic figures of the two island churches,
exulting and undying martyrs in the midst of flames.

It is a place of fine weather, and this is a book of fine weather, a
book written in Spring. I will not remember the winter and the rain. It
was the Spring that brought Sarah Brown to Mitten Island, and the Spring
that first showed her magic. It was the Spring that awoke her on her
first morning in the House of Living Alone.

She awoke because it was so beautiful outside, and because there was a
beautiful day coming. You could see the day secretly making preparations
behind a shining mist. She heard a sound of breathless singing, and the
whipping of stirred grass in the garden, the sound of some one
unbearably happy, dancing. Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad
before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like
getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach.

Sarah Brown went to her window. The newborn trembling slants of smoke
went up from the houses of the island. There was a sky of that quiet
design which suffices half a day unchanged. A garden of quite a good
many yards lay behind the house; it contained no potatoes or anything
useful, only long, very green grass, and a may tree, and a witch
dancing. The extraordinary music to which she was dancing was partly the
braying of a neighbouring donkey, and partly her own erratic singing.
She danced, as you may imagine, in a very far from grown-up way, rather
like a baby that has thought of a new funny way of annoying its Nana;
and she sang, too, like a child that inadvertently bursts into loud
tuneless song, because it is morning and yet too early to get up. A