must have come first to some one--and why not to me? I answer, Everything
lies in everyone of us, but has to be brought to the surface. It grows a
little in one, more in that one's child, more in that child's child, and
so on and on--with curious breaks as of a river which every now and then
takes to an underground course. One thing I am sure of--that, however any
good thing came, I did not make it; I can only be glad and thankful that
in me it came to the surface, to tell me how beautiful must he be who
thought of it, and made it in me. Then surely one is nearer, if not to
God himself, yet to the things God loves, in the country than amid ugly
houses--things that could not have been invented by God, though he made
the man that made them. It is not the fashionable only that love the
town and not the country; the men and women who live in dirt and
squalor--their counterparts in this and worse things far more than they
think--are afraid of loneliness, and hate God's lovely dark.




CHAPTER II.


MISS MARTHA MOON.

Let me look back and see what first things I first remember!

All about my uncle first; but I keep him to the last. Next, all about
Rover, the dog--though for roving, I hardly remember him away from my
side! Alas, he did not live to come into the story, but I must mention
him here, for I shall not write another book, and, in the briefest
summary of my childhood, to make no allusion to him would be disloyalty.