The Project Gutenberg EBook of The White People, by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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Title: The White People

Author: Frances Hodgson Burnett

Release Date: March 14, 2006 [EBook #459]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE PEOPLE ***

Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger

THE WHITE PEOPLE

By Frances Hodgson Burnett

TO LIONEL

"The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high
Can keep my own away from me."

THE WHITE PEOPLE

CHAPTER I

Perhaps the things which happened could only have happened to me. I do
not know. I never heard of things like them happening to any one else.
But I am not sorry they did happen. I am in secret deeply and strangely
glad. I have heard other people say things--and they were not always
sad people, either--which made me feel that if they knew what I know it
would seem to them as though some awesome, heavy load they had always
dragged about with them had fallen from their shoulders. To most people
everything is so uncertain that if they could only see or hear and know
something clear they would drop upon their knees and give thanks. That
was what I felt myself before I found out so strangely, and I was only a
girl. That is why I intend to write this down as well as I can. It will
not be very well done, because I never was clever at all, and always
found it difficult to talk.

I say that perhaps these things could only have happened to me, because,
as I look back over my life, I realize that it has always been a rather
curious one. Even when those who took care of me did not know I was
thinking at all, I had begun to wonder if I were not different from
other children. That was, of course, largely because Muircarrie
Castle was in such a wild and remote part of Scotland that when my few
relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty, their
journey from London, or their pleasant places in the south of England,
seemed to them like a pilgrimage to a sort of savage land; and when a
conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little civ