father nor mother, nor one of their fathers or mothers: how little then
can I say as to what I am! But I will tell as much as most of my readers,
if ever I have any, will care to know.

I come of a long yeoman-line of the name of Whichcote. In Scotland the
Whichcotes would have been called _lairds_; in England they were not
called _squires_. Repeatedly had younger sons of it risen to rank and
honour, and in several generations would his property have entitled the
head of the family to rank as a squire, but at the time when I began to
be aware of existence, the family possessions had dwindled to one large
farm, on which I found myself. Naturally, while some of the family had
risen, others had sunk in the social scale; and of the latter was Miss
Martha Moon, far more to my life than can appear in my story. I should
imagine there are few families in England covering a larger range of
social difference than ours. But I begin to think the chief difficulty in
writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.

I may mention, however, my conviction, that I owe many special delights
to the gradual development of my race in certain special relations to the
natural ways of the world. That I was myself brought up in such
relations, appears not enough to account for the intensity of my pleasure
in things belonging to simplest life--in everything of the open air, in
animals of all kinds, in the economy of field and meadow and moor. I can
no more understand my delight in the sweet breath of a cow, than I can
explain the process by which, that day in the garden--but I must not
forestall, and will say rather--than I can account for the tears which,
now I am an old woman, fill my eyes just as they used when I was a child,
at sight of the year's first primrose. A harebell, much as I have always
loved harebells, never moved me that way! Some will say the cause,
whatever it be, lies in my nature, not in my ancestry; that, anyhow, it