Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I awoke in the new house, and saw on the ceiling the light of the early sun that shone in through the copse outside, making a green and yellow dapple on the whitewash! The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh’s bed with his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed stealthily and went downstairs and out. From the lawn I could see the viaduct over which we had come, and below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded like a frosty breath and beyond the town there stretched broad and shining the estuary of the Fal. Instead of the sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with tree-fuchsias, and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never was there such a bower of a habitation. On that April morning no doubt the fuchsia and the roses were not in flower, but looking back now, that moment seems to have sucked into itself the decorations of all the months, making in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot now disentangle the true component parts. But surely there was a gorse bush at the corner of the house, on the edge of the copse through which the sun had shone, and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy feathery little football of a tit’s nest, woven inextricably among the spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infinitesimal bird peeped out of the circular door, when I drew too near, and scolded me well for my intrusion. I passed up the winding path that led through the shrubbery, and found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went cautiously past a row of beehives; I came through a door into a lane below the churchyard, where ferns (the sort of things not known before to exist in other localities than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties) grew quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breathlessly scampering and surfeited with impressions past woodshed and haystack and stable, and upstairs again with heart and shoes alike drenched with the spring-dew.
All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were considerably relaxed, and the lovely months passed like some fugue built on the subjects of that early walk, coloured, amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize for botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, personally pressed, and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper with the English, and, if possible, the Latin name written below), and we scoured the hedges and liquid water-sides and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a definite object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition of those names (Latin if possible), but this, like some homœopathic dose conveyed in honey, was drowned in the delight of rambling explorations. The appetite of the collector was whetted; there was a certain craving created for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest in the loveliness that we should not otherwise have noticed, and the admiration which the interest engendered. Definitely also I think I trace a love of words in themselves which this studied collecting gave us, for what child could write “centaury” or “meadow-sweet,” “bee-orchis,” “comfrey,” “loosestrife,” or in more exalted spheres, “Osmunda regalis” on the virgin sheet of cartridge paper without tasting something of the flavour of these blossom-like syllables? Or what child could fail to whoop with gladness when one of us brought an unknown bloom to a certain botanist friend of my father’s, and was apologetically told that its name was “Stinking Archangel”? For in the lives of all of us, words and due discrimination in their use came to play a considerable part, and somewhere we hoarded these rich additions to our vocabulary. My sister Nellie won the prize, and I remember that she afterwards confessed to me that she had stolen some of my pressed specimens and added them to her own. I never was more astonished, and class this lapse of hers with instances already given of my own demoniacal possession in the matter of the Easter egg and the sheepskin hearthrug. We both agreed that she could not possibly resign the prize, for that would lead to investigation, and she gave me a shilling by way of compensation.