turn the
gentle inhabitants out into the night and rain, the shades of my
little children who used to sit round the fire of winter evenings, or
by the window in the long, exquisite summer days. It is like long,
long ago, when Nella and Cuckoo and Darling died.

XV

THE FIELDS OF MY CHILDHOOD

They lie far away, gray with the mists of memory, under a veil of
distance, half-silver, half-gold, like the gossamer, so far that they
might never have been save only in dreams. They are not nearly so real
as the Eastern world of the stories I read yesterday, but I know where
they lie--common fields nowadays, and seldom visited. Yet, there was a
child once who knew every inch of them as well as the ant her anthill,
or the silvery minnow her brown well under the stone cover, to which
one descends by ancient water-stained steps.

The fields are there, but their face somewhat changed, as other things
are changed. We were little ones when we came to live among them, in a
thatched house full of little nests of rooms, the walls of which were
run over by flowery trellises that made them country-like even by
candle-light. Of candle-light I have not much memory, for we went to
bed in the gloaming, when the long, long day had burned itself out and
the skies were washed with palest green that held the evening star;
and we slept dreamlessly till the golden day shot through the chinks
of the shutters, and we leapt to life again with a child's zest for
living. At the back of the house there was an overgrown orchard, a
dim, delicious place where the gnarled boughs made a roof against
heaven. It was our adventure, time and again, to escape through our
windows and wash our feet in the May dew before we were discovered.
One whole summer, indeed, these revels were hindered by a bull which
was pastured on the lush herbage. But how entrancing it was to hear
him roar at night, close by our bed's head, or to see his great shadow
cross the chink of moonlight in the shutter! Sometimes he ate the
rose-bushes that wreathed our window, and, rubbing his gigantic
flanks against the house-wall, bellowed, while we shook in bed in
delicious tremors, and imagined our cosy nest a tent in the African
desert, with lions roaring outside. I remember the rooms so well: the
chilly parlour, only used when we had grown-up visitors, for we were
there in charge of a nurse; the red-tiled kitchen, with its settle and
its little windows opening inward; the door tha