There are Larches in these woods, and Oaks, so that the spring tints are almost as wonderful as the autumn. When the Furze and Broom are all guinea-gold on the moor, the young Bracken begins to creep in green patches that are pure joy. Later on the Bell-heather breaks into a deep rose which, with the sun on it, holds such a glory of colour that you could scarce find its match in an old Cathedral window. And when this splendour begins to turn to russet, then comes the tender silvery amethyst of the Ling, and spreads a mantle all over those great shoulders of wild land that is of the exact hue most beautiful to contrast with the full summer woods and the blue of an August sky; a combination so matchless for colour-loving eyes that it seems as if one’s soul were not big enough to hold the complete impression. And when our Delphiniums rear themselves against this background, we feel, looking on it all, as if we could sing for the mere rapture of it; or—having no voice—roll in the grass like Loki or like Bunny.
For a long time we—Loki’s Grandfather and Grandmother—had said to each other that we must have a week-end cottage. We were so tired of hiring other people’s houses, summer after summer, and of the labour ‹not unattended by some pleasurable excitement on Loki’s Grandmother’s part› of pulling their furniture about, and hiding away all the family portraits and the choicest works of art, to make the alien spaces tolerable to one’s own individuality. So tired, too, of the boredom and worry of having to restore everything to its pristine ugliness and hang up the enlarged photographs and the dreadful oil paintings on the walls once more—a tedious task, albeit enlivened on one occasion by the thrilling discovery that, having consigned these treasures to an oak chest in the hall, most of them had grown fur; and that on another the oil painting of your detested landlady, in middle Victorian chignon and the hump of the period, has received a scratch on the nose which no copious application of linseed oil will disguise. We always detest our landlady ... though not as much as we loathe the tenants who may happen to hire a house of ours.
At the end of each summer, therefore, we would make elaborate calculations to prove what a great economy it would be to have a little place of our own. Finally these plans and desires crystallized into action. When Loki’s Grandfather returned from a round of inspection to the hotel where we were staying in the district we fancied, and told Loki’s Grandmother that he had visited a funny little house with a terrace upon which he “saw her”—in his own phraseology—she was extremely sceptical. And when we drove down the hill to view his discovery, and were literally dropped from the side road through a perfunctory gate into the steepest little courtyard it is possible to imagine, and she beheld green stains on the rough-cast wall of the white small house, her scepticism increased to scoffing point. She was blind to the charms of the pretty pillared porch. The narrowness of the entrance passage filled her with disdain. Though she grudgingly admitted a possibility in the drawing-room, it was not until we emerged upon the terrace that her preventions vanished.—That rise and fall of moorland in such startling proximity, and the way in which the house and its terraces seemed to cling to the hillside and be perched in space between the giant curves and the dip of the valley beyond, fairly took her breath away. An artist friend described the first impression of the view in these words: “It is so sudden!” For a long time, even after the queer, fascinating spot had become our own, this wonder of “suddenness” always seized us.