The walls of the wood-house have their share of green; on the north side an ivy, with a gnarled main stem the size of a fair sized tree trunk, sends evergreen branches over roof as well as walls. Outside the door, which opens to the south, stone-crop has planted itself in masses among the stones, a perfect carpet of it, that in June is a bright yellow. In the “good old times,” before my day, the stone-crop served as a convenient spot on which to dump the coal sacks!
On the western side where the ground drops down—a warm, snug and sheltered bank—in the long grass white violets bloom by the thousand in the early spring, their sweet little blossoms streaked with mauve, nestling up to the old grey walls with the trustfulness of little children. Add to this long-fronded ferns growing out from among the wall stones, and you have an idea of the geography of the place.
On a hot day the cool shade on the north side is an ideal resting place; on a chilly day the south side gives you a shield from the wind. A pile of tree trunks and old logs lying outside fairly ask you to sit for a moment and take in some of the loveliness of the scene—you can never exhaust the whole of it—and if you sit for a minute you will probably sit there for hours.
Here is absolute quiet of spirit, but never silence. The trees are seldom still; all day and all night the wind upon these hills sways the tall, lithe tops of the larches to and fro, to and fro; the leaves and the catkins of the birches are for ever fluttering; the vibrant branches of the pines hum and sing in the breezes, summer or winter; the music of it all never ceases though it varies in volume according to the season. On the hottest summer days the grasses still sigh; the bees hum all day long in the clover; the blue-tits tweet and twitter as they swing about the birches, and their cousins the coal-tits keep up an endless run of comment in the larches. In May the nightingale comes into the grove to sing; in June rival chaffinches perch on the top spikes of certain spruce trees—always the same bird on the same spike—and defy each other and the world in general. The stock-dove croons over its nest in the tallest firs, and the reddy-brown squirrel scolds you severely if you are coming too near his own particular chosen tree.
Inside the wood-house you may find many things; some you are prepared for, some you are not. In theory, it is sacred to the use of the Head of Affairs, a sort of play-house and workshop combined, wherein no handy man is supposed to set foot, and no prying eyes are supposed to discover that the owner is working in a jersey, with no qualms over the absence of waistcoat and stiff collar.
But I often go in when I am anxious to be alone and wanting many things that one cannot put down in words. And knowing this, the Head of Affairs doesn’t keep his best saws there!—not the splendid big “Farmer’s Saw,” with its doubly notched teeth, that run through big fir trunks with amazing ease; nor the finer tools that deal with the short snappy branches. No, the saw that is left for such emergencies is a nondescript article that has now a wavy—very wavy—edge, and a few of its teeth doubled over; a saw that seems as though you can never get it well into the wood, and once you have got it in, it can’t be got out again, much less be made to move with soft purring motion.
You see, I have individuality where sawing is concerned, but it is useless to talk about it, for I’ve come to the conclusion that whatever other moral improvements a woman may manage to effect in the man she marries, it is a lifework to get him to a proper appreciation of her method of goffering a saw!
But I must beg you not to picture the wood-house as the home of the miscellaneous collection of nondescript oddments so indescribably dear to every masculine heart. There is an outhouse elsewhere that accommodates short lengths of chain, pieces of wire netting, old locks, bits of copper wire, staples and hooks, broken hinges (that might be made do duty again, if any one ever has a gate that prefers its hinges to be broken), oil cans, a piece of lead pipe, various lengths of iron rods, broom handles, stale putty, old keys, a couple of invalided padlocks, and—well, you know the type of things that every self-respecting man likes to gather around him, and keep handy, in case he might need them at any moment.
Unfortunately one of the many blighting influences of town-life, for ever hindering the full flowering of one’s better nature, is the lack of the necessary space to stock such useful items. But in the country one is not so hampered, and one’s private marine store grows apace, and differs only according to the temperament of the collector. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that country air develops in man and woman alike that tendency to hoard, which is so noticeable in early childhood, when the small girl collects buttons and clippings from her mother’s sewing-room, and the small boy bulges the blouse of his sailor suit with string and “conquers” and coloured chalks, and old penknives and young frogs.