resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though
it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced
for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and
children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the
decencies.

There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches
sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white
blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding.
I never saw such masses of them; they seemed to fill the place. Even
across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in
the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture
of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are great
stretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave
off the bare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in
their lofty, pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest
gray-green, and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and
everywhere the breathless silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful
too, for one can see across them into eternity almost, and to go out on
to them with one's face towards the setting sun is like going into the
very presence of God.

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of birdcherries and greenery
where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray
stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The house
is very old, and has been added to at various times. It was a convent
before the Thirty Years' War, and the vaulted chapel, with its brick
floor worn by pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall. Gustavus
Adolphus and his Swedes passed through more than once, as is duly
recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on what was then the
high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lion of
the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to his
convictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who were
not without convictions of their own, sending them out on to the wide,
empty plain to piteously seek some life to replace the life of silence
here.

From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the
plain, with no obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue
line of distant forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the
setting sun--n