Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

"No, no," she finally said to herself, "my boy's well and happy and that's more than he was in Lud, these last few months. What must be must be, and it's never any use worrying Master Nat."

So she did not show Master Nathaniel Luke Hempen's letter.

As for Master Nathaniel, he was enchanted by the accounts he received from Endymion Leer of the improvement both in Ranulph's health and state of mind. Ranulph himself too wrote little letters saying how happy he was and how anxious to stay on at the farm. It was evident that, to use the words of Endymion Leer, he was learning to live life to a different tune.

And then Endymion Leer returned to Lud and confirmed what he had said in his letters by his accounts of how well and happy Ranulph was in the life of a farm.

The summer was simmering comfortably by, in its usual sleepy way, in the streets and gardens of Lud-in-the-Mist. The wives of Senators and burgesses were busy in still-room and kitchen making cordials and jams; in the evening the streets were lively with chattering voices and the sounds of music, and 'prentices danced with their masters' daughters in the public square, or outside taverns, till the grey twilight began to turn black. The Senators yawned their way through each other's speeches, and made their own as short as possible that they might hurry off to whip the Dapple for trout or play at bowls on the Guild Hall's beautiful velvety green. And when one of their ships brought in a particularly choice cargo of rare wine or exotic sweetmeats they invited their friends to supper, and washed down the dainties with the good old jokes.

Mumchance looked glum, and would sometimes frighten his wife by gloomy forebodings; but he had learned that it was no use trying to arouse the Mayor and the Senate.

Master Nathaniel was missing Ranulph very much; but as he continued to get highly satisfactory reports of his health he felt that it would be selfish not to let him stay on, at any rate till the summer was over.

Then the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in yellow and red. And the days began to shrink under one's very eyes. And Master Nathaniel's pleached alley was growing yellower and yellower, and on the days when a thick white mist came rolling up from the Dapple it would be the only object in his garden that was not blurred and dimmed, and would look like a pair of gigantic golden compasses with which a demiurge is measuring chaos.

It was then that things began to happen; moreover, they began at the least likely place in the whole of Lud-in-the-Mist—Miss Primrose Crabapple's Academy for young ladies.

Miss Primrose Crabapple had for some twenty years "finished" the daughters of the leading citizens; teaching them to sing, to dance, to play the spinet and the harp, to preserve and candy fruit, to wash gauzes and lace, to bone chickens without cutting the back, to model groups of still life in every imaginable plastic material, edible and non-edible—wax, butter, sugar—and to embroider in at least a hundred different stitches—preparing them, in fact, to be one day useful and accomplished wives.