t gave on a grass-grown
approach; and the stone seat outside, where we sat to shell peas, or
made 'plays' with broken bits of crockery and the shreds of shining
tin pared by the travelling tinker when he mended the porringers. I
remember the very cups and saucers from which we drank our rare
draughts of tea--delicate china, with sea-shells on it in tones of
gray, the varied shapes of which gave us ever-new interest.

As I look back, I can never see that house in unwinking daylight,
though it was perpetual summer then, and never a rainy day. Rooms and
passages are always dim with a subdued green light, the reflection, I
suppose, through the narrow windows wreathed with verdure, and from
the grass and the plaited apple-boughs. But the spirit of improvement
has laid all waste, has thrown the wee rooms into ample ones, has
changed the narrow windows for bays and oriels, has thinned the
apple-trees for the sake of the grass. There was once a pond, long and
green, with a little island in the midst, where a water-hen had her
nest. I always thought of it as the pond in Hans Andersen's _Ugly
Duckling_, and never watched the ducks paddling among the reeds that I
did not look to the sky to see the wild geese, that were
contemptuously friendly with the poor hero, flecking the pearl-strewn
blue. The pond is filled up now with the macadam of a model farmyard.
Iron and stone have replaced the tumble-down yellow sheds, where we
drank sheep's milk in a gloom powdered with sun-rays; the two
shrubberies have gone, and the hedge of wild roses that linked the
trees in the approach to the house. Naught remains save the thatched
roof, many feet deep, the green porch over the hall door, the stone
seat round the streaky apple-tree at the garden gate, and the garden
itself, where the largest lilies I have ever seen stand in the sun,
and the apple-trees are in the garden-beds, the holly-hocks elbow the
gooseberries, and the violets push out their little clumps in the
celery-bed.

But the fields. It is only to the ignorant all fields are the same; as
there are some who see no individualities in animals because they have
no heart for them. Here and there hedges have been levelled and dykes
filled, and now their places are marked by a long dimple in the land's
face. The well in the midst of one has been filled up, despite the
warning of an old mountain farmer that ill-luck would surely follow
whosoever demolished the fairy well. Over it grew a clu