In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary by Maurice Hewlett
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page 17 of 174 (09%)
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long way from my valley in the Downs.
I shall first of all sink a well, for one must have water, even if one is going to die. Then I shall make a mist-pool--that art is not lost yet--because as well as water to drink I like water to look upon. Lastly, I will build a hermitage of puddled chalk and straw, and thatch it with reeds, if I can get them. It will consist of a single room thirty feet long. It will have a gallery at each end, attained by a ladder. In each gallery shall be a bed, and the appurtenance thereof, one for use and one for a co-hermit or hermitess, if such there be. I leave that open. There must be a stoop, of course. Nothing enclosed. No flowers, by request. The sheep shall nibble to the very threshold. I don't forget that there is a fox-earth in the spinney attached. I saw a vixen and her cubs there one morning as clearly as I see this paper. She barked at me once or twice, sitting high on her haunches, but the children played on without a glance at me. They were playing at catch-as-catch-can--with a full-grown hare. Sheer fun. No after-thoughts. I watched them for twenty minutes. If I grow anything there at all I shall confine my part of the business to planting, and let Nature do the rest. It may be absolutely necessary to keep the sheep off for a year or two, and the rabbits--but that is all. And what I do plant shall be deciduous, so that I may have the yearly miracle to expect. It is a mighty eater of time--and there won't be much of that left probably; yet a joy which no man who has ever begotten anything, baby or poem, can deny himself. If anybody wants to see what Nature can do in the way of a season's growth, I can tell him how to go to work. Let him plant on the bank of a running water a root of _Gunnera manicata_. Let him then wait ten |
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