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MRS. DAY BEGINS THE STORY.
I am old, else, I think, I should not have the courage to tell the story
I am going to tell. All those concerned in it about whose feelings I am
careful, are gone where, thank God, there are no secrets! If they know
what I am doing, I know they do not mind. If they were alive to read as I
record, they might perhaps now and again look a little paler and wish the
leaf turned, but to see the things set down would not make them unhappy:
they do not love secrecy. Half the misery in the world comes from trying
to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. I would that not God
only but all good men and women might see me through and through. They
would not be pleased with everything they saw, but then neither am I, and
I would have no coals of fire in my soul's pockets! But my very nature
would shudder at the thought of letting one person that loved a secret
see into it. Such a one never sees things as they are--would not indeed
see what was there, but something shaped and coloured after his own
likeness. No one who loves and chooses a secret can be of the pure in
heart that shall see God.
Yet how shall I tell even who I am? Which of us is other than a secret to
all but God! Which of us can tell, with poorest approximation, what he or
she is! Not to touch the mystery of life--that one who is not myself has
made me able to say I, how little can any of us tell about even those
ancestors whose names we know, while yet the nature, and still more the
character, of hundreds of them, have shared in determining what I means
every time one of us utters the word! For myself, I remember neither
father nor mother, nor one of their fathers or mothers: how little then
can I say as to what I am! But I will tell as much as most of my readers,
if ever I have any, will care to know.
I come of a long yeoman-line of the name of Whichcote. In Scotland the
Whichcotes would have been called lairds; in England they were not
called squires. Repeatedly had younger sons of it risen to rank and
honour, and in several generations would his property have entitled the
head of the family to rank as a squire, but at the time when I began to
be aware of existence, the family possessions had dwindled to one large
farm, on which I found myself. Naturally, while some of the family had
risen, others had sunk in the social scale; and of the latter was Miss
Martha Moon, far more to my life than can appear in my story. I should
imagine there are few families in England covering a larger range of
social difference than ours. But I begin to think the chief difficulty in
writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.
I may mention, however, my conviction, that I owe many special delights
to the gradual development of my race in certain special relations to the
natural ways of the world. That I was myself brought up in such
relations, appears not enough to account for the intensity of my pleasure
in things belonging to simplest life--in everything of the open air, in
animals of all kinds, in the economy of field and meadow and moor. I can
no more understand my delight in the sweet breath of a cow, than I can
explain the process by which, that day in the garden--but I must not
forestall, and will say rather--than I can account for the tears which,
now I am an old woman, fill my eyes just as they used when I was a child,
at sight of the year's first primrose. A harebell, much as I have always
loved harebells, never moved me that way! Some will say the cause,
whatever it be, lies in my nature, not in my ancestry; that, anyhow, it
must have come first to some one--and why not to me? I answer, Everything
lies in everyone of us, but has to be brought to the surface. It grows a
little in one, more in that one's child, more in that child's child, and
so on and on--with curious breaks as of a river which every now and then
takes to an underground course. One thing I am sure of--that, however any
good thing came, I did not make it; I can only be glad and thankful that
in me it came to the surface, to tell me how beautiful must he be who
thought of it, and made it in me. Then surely one is nearer, if not to
God himself, yet to the things God loves, in the country than amid ugly
houses--things that could not have been invented by God, though he made
the man that made them. It is not the fashionable only that love the
town and not the country; the men and women who live in dirt and
squalor--their counterparts in this and worse things far more than they
think--are afraid of loneliness, and hate God's lovely dark.
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