I AM PUT TO GREAT TORMENT BY MY PASSION.
As soon as I was strong enough to get about, I went daily with my lady into the woods a-hunting; but as yet my left arm was useless, though getting strong apace, so that I could but play the part of squire to her. But, Lord! to see how dexterous she was with the bow, did give me more pride and pleasure than any of my own prowess. Yet from the tenderness of her love for all living things she was averse from this practice, which we men regard as an amusing pastime, and therefore would she kill nothing but that which was necessary to our existence.
I remember one day, when she had drawn her bow to shoot a dove that sat pluming its wings on a bough, she relaxed the string and returned the arrow to her sheaf.
"'Tis a fine fat pigeon," says I, "and we have naught for our supper: why have you spared it?"
"Do you not see her mate in the bough above?" says she. And so we supped on fruit and cassavy that night; but with no regret.
However, if there were moments of pain in these expeditions, there were long hours of delight; for now the woods were as like to Paradise as the mind of man can conceive, nothing lacking to enchant the senses; and to speak of all the rare and beautiful flowers and fruits we carried home to garnish our cavern would be an endless undertaking. And as these woods, valleys, and purling streams were like Paradise, so was I like a blessed soul therein; and I doubt if many men in all their lives sum up so much pure joy as every minute yielded to me. Here, day after day, I strolled beside my dear lady in the shade of delicate flowers, enveloped in sweet odors, and with warbling birds around us. But to my senses the sweetest music was her voice, the daintiest bloom her cheek, the most intoxicating perfume her breath. Looking around, it seemed to me that all Nature did but reflect her beauty, and therein lay its perfection. There were favorite spots where we would rest, noting the development of familiar things—how these buds expanded, how that fruit ripened, how the young birds began to stretch their naked necks beyond the nest's edge, crying for food; indeed, there was such scope for observation, and my dear lady was so quick to perceive and appreciate all things of beauty, that no moment was dull or tame.
While we indulged to the full our love for rambling, we were not unmindful of domestic things. The season was now come for plucking silk grass, and of this we cut an abundance, and laid it on the rocks to dry; for my lady designed to plait it, in the Ingas' style, into a long strip, which she might make up into clothing by-and-by. This plaiting was the first work I put my hand to, and though I bungled sadly over it to begin with, I grew defter in time, so that I could do it as well in the dark as in the day. Many an evening we sat weaving our grass hour after hour, with no light but that of the stars as they twinkled forth, chatting the whole while of other matters. But before I got to this proficiency—indeed, as soon as I could plait decently—I made a hat for my lady; not so much like a woman's as a boy's, that it might go fairly with her habit; and this, with a couple of bright tail-feathers from a macucagui[6] stuck in jauntily o' one side, became her mightily, though I say it; but, for that matter, anything looked well that she took for her use.
About this time we had the good fortune to catch a partlet sitting on a nest of fifteen eggs; taking these home without delay, we clapped the eggs in a corner of our conies' cavern, where the hen, after some little ado, sat down upon them, being hemmed in with the hurdle that parted off my bed-chamber from our parlor, which I fetched out for that purpose.
About a fortnight later my Lady Biddy came to me in great glee one morning to say that every one of the eggs were hatched out; and I know not which looked the more content, this old hen strutting carefully amidst her chicks as proud as a peacock, or my dear lady casting some cassavy pap before them for a meal.
And now the conies multiplying prodigiously, that cavern was full of young live things, so that there was as much work to provide for their mouths as our own; but there was never too much for my lady to do, and she would not part with a single one.