The Hills Were
In General Not Wooded, But Naked And Barren; And You Saw The Flocks
At A Distance Grazing On Their Summit.
As I was coming through one of the villages, I heard a great
farmer's boy eagerly ask another if he did not think I was a
Frenchman.
It seemed as if he had been waiting some time to see the
wonder; for, he spoke as though his wish was now accomplished.
When I was past Bakewell, a place far inferior to Derby, I came by
the side of a broad river, to a small eminence, where a fine
cultivated field lay before me. This field, all at once, made an
indescribable and very pleasing impression on me, which at first, I
could not account for; till I recollected having seen, in my
childhood, near the village where I was educated, a situation
strikingly similar to that now before me here in England.
This field, as if it had been in Germany, was not enclosed with
hedges, but every spot in it was uninterruptedly diversified with
all kinds of crops and growths of different green and yellowish
colours, which gave the whole a most pleasing effect; but besides
this large field, the general view of the country, and a thousand
other little circumstances which I cannot now particularly
enumerate, served to bring back to my recollection the years of my
youth.
Here I rested myself a while, and when I was going on again I
thought of the place of my residence, on all my acquaintances, and
not a little on you, my dearest friend, and imagined what you would
think and say, if you were to see your friend thus wandering here
all alone, totally unknown, and in a foreign land. And at that
moment I first seriously felt the idea of distance, and the thought
that I was now in England, so very far from all I loved, or who
loved me, produced in me such sensations as I have not often felt.
It was perhaps the same with you, my dearest friend, when on our
journey to Hamburg we drove from Perlsbeg, to your birthplace, the
village of Boberow; where, among the farmers, you again found your
own playmates, one of whom was now become the bailiff of the place.
On your asking them whether they knew you, one and all of them
answered so heartily, "O, yes, yes - why, your are Master Frederic."
The pedantic school-master, you will remember, was not so frank. He
expressed himself in the stiff town phrase of, "He had not the
honour of knowing you, as during your residence in that village,
when a child, he had not been in loco."
I now came through a little place of the name of Ashford, and wished
to reach the small village of Wardlow, which was only three miles
distant, when two men came after me, at a distance, whom I had
already seen at Matlock, who called to me to wait for them.
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