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Lily Hardy Hammond
In the Garden of Delight
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338087379
Table of Contents
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I
A Country Child
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There is one thing, at least, in this puzzling world which, though everything changes it, nothing can spoil: and that is out-of-doors. Long ago, when this place was stately old Cedarhurst instead of home-y Bird Corners, and I a wilful small girl climbing trees and tearing my frocks whenever Great-aunt Virginia and Great-aunt Letitia were both looking the other way at the same time—a coincidence as blissful as it was infrequent—I thought being outdoors was heaven enough for anybody.
In the long winter afternoons I sat by the big wood fire in the back parlor and hemmed towels and napkins—when I wasn’t pulling out yesterday’s work because Great-aunt Virginia found the stitches too big: and I looked out at the cold, bare hills, blue and beautiful against the pale sky, and longed to play over them like the winds, and to be whirled up into the air like the brown leaves which scurried about them all winter long. And in the spring, when the budding branches draped the trees with jewelled mists, all silver and green and gold and ruby-red, I wished the great-aunts had learned to play on the grass with their whole selves, instead of just with their fingers on the big old rosewood piano, which stood stiff and square in the front parlor, an instrument of torture to rebellious hands that longed to be pulling wild-flowers, and to ears tuned to catch the songs of birds. And in summer time, when the rain blotted out the hills, and every leaf of every tree sang the Song of the Rushing Winds; when the lightning ran zig-zag all over the sky and the thunder jarred the house—oh, why should great-aunts call one indoors, and shut the free winds out, and put cotton in their ears, and make little girls come away from the windows, and the chimneys, and every place where they wanted to be, instead of leaving them out in the rain to be drenched like the flowers and shake themselves dry like the birds?