“I planted out nine hundred and thirty-seven wallflower seedlings yesterday, and I want to cover them up with fern before the sun gets too strong. If you’ll get up you can gather the bracken, while I creep around on all fours covering them up. See? Virginia is busy thinning out the turnips. And SHE is never any good at getting up early, you know!”
I regret to say this last scornful reference is to me!
And now when you look out of the little bedroom window again, to the accompaniment of an early cup of tea, what a change has taken place since yesterday! Last night the ranges of opposite hills, with the sun setting behind them, looked vague and mysterious with shadows. This morning the sun is full on them, but now there is another mystery—or so it seems to those who see it for the first time.
Instead of looking down into the green tree-clad valley to where the river winds along at the base of the steep hills, you now look down on to a bank of solid white—the mist that rises up at night and fills the lower part of the valley, reminding one of the mist that went up from the earth in the first Garden, “and watered the whole face of the ground.”
With the sun on it, the mist gives back a dazzling light. And then slowly, slowly, the whole white bank in the valley lifts silently and wonderfully; up and up it goes in a solid mass, and as the higher parts of the hills, which were previously in sunshine, are temporarily hidden by the uprising mass, so the lower part of the valley gradually becomes visible, first only a strip at the very bottom, then more and more as the white curtain is raised. Finally the white mass disappears and joins its fellows in the sky above, a fragment of cloud lingering sometimes a little below the summit of the highest hill. If the day is going to be fine, this last trail of silvery cloud disappears, and then the sun lights up the woods and the upland meadows, showing you distant cottages and far-off farmhouses where you saw nothing but tremulous shadows the night before.
However often one looks upon this sight, the marvel never lessens, and the “simple scientific explanation,” which every learned person who visits this cottage pours over the breakfast-table, is quite unnecessary. Scientific explanations are admirable for cities, but when we set foot on these hills, it is just sufficient for us that Nature “is.”
One drawback about this cottage is the fact that one’s poetic thoughts and soulful dreams are constantly being interrupted by things material, more especially those appertaining to food! And even as you are gazing out of the window at the glorious scenery all around you, there arises the odour of frizzling ham (that originally ran about, uncooked, in a field lower down), fried potatoes (the good old-fashioned sort done in the frying-pan), coffee, and other hungry things; and you find to your surprise that a substantial breakfast is on the table by eight o’clock, though (and this is where guests bless their hostess) no one need get up to breakfast, if they prefer to have it in bed, for very tired people come here sometimes.