dancing like the slender sylph she really was, but never can I
forget the odd effect of the gentlemen's feet! No one had their
dress boots up at the station, and as Alice and I firmly declined to
dance with anybody who wore "Cookham" boots (great heavy things with
nails in the soles), they had no other course open to them except to
wear their smart slippers. There were slippers of purple velvet,
embroidered with gold; others of blue kid, delicately traced in
crimson lines; foxes heads stared at us in startling perspective
from a scarlet ground; or black jim-crow figures disported
themselves on orange tent-stitch. Then these slippers were all more
or less of an easy fit, and had a way of flying out on the lawn
suddenly, startling my dear dog Nettle out of his first sleep.

Ah, well! that may be an absurd bit of one's life to look back upon,
but its days were bright and innocent enough. Health was so perfect
that the mere sensation of being alive became happiness, and all the
noise of the eager, bustling, pushing world, seemed shut away by
those steep hills which folded our quiet valley in their green arms.
People have often said to me since, "Surely you would not like to
have lived there for ever?" Perhaps not. I can only say that three
years of that calm, idyllic life, held no weary hour for me, and I
am quite sure that quiet time was a great blessing to me in many
ways. First of all, in health, for a person must be in a very bad
way indeed for New Zealand air not to do them a world of good; next,
in teaching me, amid a great deal of fun and laughter, sundry useful
accomplishments, not easily learned in our luxurious civilization;
and, lastly, those few years of seclusion from the turmoil of life
brought leisure to think out one's own thoughts, and to sift them
from other peoples' ideas. Under such circumstances, it is hard if
"the unregarded river of our life," as Matthew Arnold so finely call