ooming - the great chestnut-tree under which they played at houses, their own little river, the Ripple, where the banks seemed like home, and Tom was always seeing the water-rats, while Maggie gathered the purple plumy tops of the reeds which she forgot and dropped afterwards, above all, the great Floss along which they wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring tide - the awful Eagre - come up like a hungry monster, or to see the Great Ash which had once wailed and groaned like a man - these things would always be just the same to them. Tom thought people were at a disadvantage who lived on any other spot of the globe, and Maggie when she read --------------------------------------------------------------------------------page 94 about Christiana passing 'the river over which there is no bridge' always saw the Floss between the green pastures by the Great Ash. Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, - if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass - the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows - the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known? The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet - what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-note...
