Pleasant Hours,
Live long.”
It is the kind of little incident that seems to happen at Villino Loki, where animals and human beings are queer and unexpected, and live together in simplicity and cheerfulness.
V
Travelling along the pleasant path of life, on the reverse side of the hill, the downward course ‹how graphic is the French of it for the later and “smaller half” of our allotted span: sur le retour›, there is a tendency to dwell more upon memories and proportionately less on ambitions. The prospect now ahead, placid and mellowed as it may be, naturally dwindles to narrower margins. Its interest is more of the immediate order; deals mostly with hopes and doings of the coming season. And, the circle of recollection widening, things distant in the past appeal with proportionate insistency to the mind’s eye.
“DREAMING BACKWARDS”
I believe this is the case with all thinking creatures ‹says Loki’s Grandpa—who has fallen into a reminiscent mood›. With one whose lazy and musing propensities, whose delight in day-dreams has proved his paramount weakness, the habit of “dreaming backwards” and hunting for old impressions has become as haunting, in these years of the sixth decade, as was, in salad days, the “dreaming forward” and the straining for a sight of things still below the horizon.
For instance: in a life which has always been one of constant book-companionship, the printed passages which most delight me are those which, having been first read in another age and re-discovered in this one, bring back a pulse of some long forgotten impression. The impression may be one that sober and critical memory does not record as having been so particularly enthralling at the time—yet it now comes back with a subtle fragrance all its own.
The long darkness of winter provides the richest reading hours. And if the page-turning is by the side of a wood fire—as happens on this, the coldest day of the year—if it is in a deep armchair with the lamp throwing its quiet rays over one’s shoulder, why, it is apt to become interspersed with long spells of wide-eyed dreaming. The fire burns with that special clearness, that kind of conscious eagerness which one observes inside the hearth upon a keen frosty night. In the town a frosty night is but a cold night. But here, on our country hill-side, when winter, albeit officially over, is in reality still with us, a frosty night inevitably turns our thoughts to the threatened hopes of the garden.