s I do in extreme old age, I may say it without false shame, a
very handsome youth to boot. I was not over tall, indeed, measuring but
five feet nine inches and a half in height, but my limbs were well made,
and I was both deep and broad in the chest. In colour I was, and my
white hair notwithstanding, am still extraordinarily dark hued, my eyes
also were large and dark, and my hair, which was wavy, was coal black.
In my deportment I was reserved and grave to sadness, in speech I was
slow and temperate, and more apt at listening than in talking. I weighed
matters well before I made up my mind upon them, but being made up,
nothing could turn me from that mind short of death itself, whether it
were set on good or evil, on folly or wisdom. In those days also I had
little religion, since, partly because of my father's secret teaching
and partly through the workings of my own reason, I had learned to doubt
the doctrines of the Church as they used to be set out. Youth is prone
to reason by large leaps as it were, and to hold that all things are
false because some are proved false; and thus at times in those days I
thought that there was no God, because the priest said that the image of
the Virgin at Bungay wept and did other things which I knew that it did
not do. Now I know well that there is a God, for my own story proves it
to my heart. In truth, what man can look back across a long life and say
that there is no God, when he can see the shadow of His hand lying deep
upon his tale of years?

On this sad day of which I write I knew that Lily, whom I loved,
would be walking alone beneath the great pollard oaks in the park of
Ditchingham Hall. Here, in Grubswell as the spot is called, grew, and
indeed still grow, certain hawthorn trees that are the earliest to blow
of any in these parts, and when we had met at the church door on the
Sunday, Lily said that there would be bloom upon them by the Wednesday,
and on that afternoon she should go to cut it. It may well be that she
spoke thus with design, for love will breed cunning in the heart of the
most guileless and truthful maid. Moreover, I noticed that though she
said it before her father and the rest of us, yet she waited to speak
till my brother Geoffrey was out of hearing, for she did not wish to
go maying with him, and also that as she spoke she shot a glance of her
grey eyes at me. Then and there I vowed to myself that I also would
be gathering hawthorn bloom in this same p