flecked with clouds so
white and dazzling that her eyes ached when she looked at them. She
had stopped a moment to cry, "Wait for me!" Jane walked on, however,
taking no notice, and Beth struggled after her, whimpering, out of
breath, choked with dust, scorched with heat, parched with thirst,
tired to death--how she suffered! A heartless lark sang overhead,
regardless of her misery: and she never afterwards heard a lark
without recalling the long white road, the heat, and dust, and
fatigue. She tore off the velvet bonnet, and threw it away, then began
another despairing "Wait for me!" But in the midst of the cry she saw
some little yellow flowers growing in the grass at the roadside, and
plumped down then and there inconsequently to gather them. By that
time Jane was out of sight; and at the moment Beth became aware of the
fact, she also perceived an appalling expanse of bright blue sky above
her, and sat, gazing upwards, paralysed with terror. This was her
first experience of loneliness, her first terrified sensation of
immensity.

Then the snowdrops and crocuses were out, and the sky grew black, and
she sat on the nursery floor and looked up at it in solemn wonder.
Flakes of snow began to fall, a few at first, then thicker and
thicker, till the air was full of them, and Jane said, "The Scotch are
picking their geese," and immediately Beth saw the Scotch sitting in
some vague scene, picking geese in frenzied haste, and throwing great
handfuls of feathers up in the air; which was probably the first
independent flight of her imagination.

It is astonishing how little consciousness of time there is in these
reminiscences. The seasons are all confounded, and it is as if things
had happened not in succession but abreast. There was snow on the
ground when her brother Jim was with her in the wash-house, making
horse-hair snares to catch birds. They made running loops of the
horse-hair, and tied them on to sticks, then went out and stuck them
in the ground in the garden outside the wash-house window, sprinkled
crumbs of bread, and crept carefully back to watch. First came a
robin with noiseless flight, and lit on the ground with its head on
one side; but the children were too eager, and in their excitement
they made a noise, and the robin flew away. Next came a sparrow, saw
the children, saw the crumbs, and, with the habitual self-possession
of his race, stretched in his head between the sticks, picked out the
largest piec