crops are gathered in. A bluish fog is rising from the lower meadows.
As I look I grow cold. It is not, somehow, an interesting evening. Yet
if I found just this evening well described in a novel, I should enjoy
it heartily. The poorest, weakest drizzle upon the window-panes of a
dreary roadside inn in a country of slate-quarries, possesses an
interest to him who enters it by the door of a book, hardly less than
the pouring rain which threatens to swell every brook to a torrent. How
is this? I think it is because your troubles do not enter into the book
and its troubles do not enter into you, and therefore nature operates
upon you unthwarted by the personal conditions which so often
counteract her present influences. But I will rather shut out the
fading west, the gathering mists, and the troubled consciousness of
nature altogether, light my fire and my pipe, and then try whether in
my first chapter I cannot be a boy again in such fashion that my
companion, that is, my reader, will not be too impatient to linger a
little in the meadows of childhood ere we pass to the corn-fields of
riper years.




CHAPTER I.


WHERE I FIND MYSELF.

No wisest chicken, I presume, can recall the first moment when the
chalk-oval surrounding it gave way, and instead of the cavern of
limestone which its experience might have led it to expect, it found a
world of air and movement and freedom and blue sky--with kites in it.