The
pickaxe and the spade have made almost a full round to every door; I do
not want to think any more about this.
Family changes and the pressure of
these hard times have driven out most of the rest; some seem to have
quite gone out of sight; some have crossed the sea; some have abandoned
the land as a livelihood. Of the few, the very few that still remain,
still fewer abide in their original homes. Time has shuffled them about
from house to house like a pack of cards. Of them all, I verily believe
there is but one soul living in the same old house. If the French had
landed in the mediaeval way to harry with fire and sword, they could not
have swept the place more clean.
Almost the first thing I did with pen and ink as a boy was to draw a map
of the hamlet with the roads and lanes and paths, and I think some of the
ponds, and with each of the houses marked and the occupier's name. Of
course it was very roughly done, and not to any scale, yet it was
perfectly accurate and full of detail. I wish I could find it, but the
confusion of time has scattered and mixed these early papers. A map by
Ptolemy would bear as much resemblance to the same country in a modern
atlas as mine to the present state of that locality. It is all
gone - rubbed out. The names against the whole of those houses have been
altered, one only excepted, and changes have taken place there. Nothing
remains. This is not in a century, half a century, or even in a quarter
of a century, but in a few ticks of the clock.
I think I have heard that the oaks are down. They may be standing or
down, it matters nothing to me; the leaves I last saw upon them are gone
for evermore, nor shall I ever see them come there again ruddy in spring.
I would not see them again even if I could; they could never look again
as they used to do. There are too many memories there. The happiest days
become the saddest afterwards; let us never go back, lest we too die.
There are no such oaks anywhere else, none so tall and straight, and with
such massive heads, on which the sun used to shine as if on the globe of
the earth, one side in shadow, the other in bright light. How often I
have looked at oaks since, and yet have never been able to get the same
effect from them! Like an old author printed in another type, the words
are the same, but the sentiment is different. The brooks have ceased to
run. There is no music now at the old hatch where we used to sit in
danger of our lives, happy as kings, on the narrow bar over the deep
water.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 198 of 204
Words from 102507 to 103011
of 105669
