t
so many years abroad, so many in Paris. I do not know what would
have become of my guardian if it had not been for her. Her father
loved her, but was very erratic and undisciplined. Mrs. Talcott has
been with my guardian for almost all the time ever since. It is a
great and silent devotion. She is very reticent. She never speaks
of herself. She talks to me sometimes in the evenings about her
youth in Maine, and the long white winters and the sleigh-rides;
and the tapping of the maple-trees in Spring; and the nutting
parties in the fall of the year. I think that she likes to remember
all this; and I love to hear her, for it reminds me of what my
father used to tell me of his youth; and I love especially to hear
of the trailing arbutus, that lovely little flower that grows
beneath the snow; how one brushes back the snow in early Spring and
finds the waxen, sweet, pink flowers and dark, shining leaves under
it. And I always imagine that it is a doubled nostalgia that I feel
and that my mother's Norway in Spring was like it, with snow and
wet woods. There is a line that brings it all over me: 'In May,
when sea-winds pierced our solitudes.' It is by Emerson. The Spring
here is very lovely, too, but it has not the sweetness that arises
from snow and a long winter. Through the whole winter the fuchsias
keep their green against the white walls of the little village,
huddled in between the headlands at the edge of the sea beneath us.
You know this country, don't you? The cliffs are so beautiful. I
love best the great headlands towards the Lizard, black rock or
grey, all spotted with rosettes of orange lichen with sweeps of
grey-green sward sloping to them. Victor becomes quite intoxicated
with the wind on these heights and goes in circles round and round,
like a puppy. Later on, all the slopes are veiled in the delicate
little pink thrift, and the stone walls are festooned with white
campion.

"Then Mrs. Talcott and I have a great deal to do about the little
farm. Mrs. Talcott is so clever at this. She makes it pay besides
giving my guardian all the milk and eggs and bacon, too, she needs.
There is a farmer and his wife, and a gardener and a boy; but with
the beautiful garden we have here it takes most of the day to see
to everything. The farmer's wi