w of another flight. All the birds have traced
wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have
fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement
of her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earth
that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

All Englishmen know the name of Lucy Hutchinson; and of her calling and
election to the most wifely of all wifehoods--that of a soldier's
wife--history has made her countrymen aware. Inasmuch as Colonel
Hutchinson was a political soldier, moreover, she is something more than
his biographer--his historian. And she convinces her reader that her
Puritan principles kept abreast of her affections. There is no
self-abandonment; she is not precipitate; keeps her own footing; wife of
a soldier as she is, would not have armed him without her own previous
indignation against the enemy. She is a soldier at his orders, but she
had warily and freely chosen her captain.

Briefly, and with the dignity that the language of her day kept unmarred
for her use, she relates her own childhood and youth. She was a child
such as those serious times desired that a child should be; that is, she
was as slightly a child, and for as brief a time, as might be. Childhood,
as an age of progress, was not to be delayed, as an age of imperfection
was to be improved, as an age of inability was not to be exposed except
when precocity distinguished it. It must at any rate be shortened. Lucy
Apsley, at four years old, read English perfectly, and was "carried to
sermons, and could remember and repeat them exactly." "At seven she had
eight tutors in several qualities." She outstripped her brothers in
Latin, albeit they were at school and she had no teacher except her
father's chaplain, who, poor gentleman, was "a pitiful dull fellow." She
was not companionable. Her many friends were indulged with "babies"
(that is, dolls) and these she pulled to pieces. She exhorted the maids,
she owned, "much." But she also heard much of their love stories, and
acquired a taste for sonnets.

It was a sonnet, and indeed one of her own writing, that brought about
her acquaintance with Mr. Hutchinson. The sonnet was read to him, and
discussed amongst his friends, with guesses at the authorship; for a
young woman did not, in that world, write a sonnet without a feint of
hiding its origin. One gentleman believed a woman had