And The Church; - I Think Its Interior Must Have Seemed Vaster, More Beautiful And Sublime To Her Wondering Little Soul Than The Greatest Cathedral Can Be To Us.

I think that our admiration for the loveliest blooms - the orchids and roses and chrysanthemums at our great annual shows - is a poor languid feeling compared to what she experienced at the sight of any common flower of the field.

Best of all perhaps were the elms at the village end, those mighty rough-barked trees that had their tops "so close against the sky." And I think that when a blackbird chanced to sing in the upper branches it was as if some angelic being had dropped down out of the sky into that green translucent cloud of leaves, and seeing the child's eager face looking up had sung a little song of his own celestial country to please her.

XIV

APPLE BLOSSOMS AND A LOST VILLAGE

The apple has not come to its perfection this season until the middle of May; even here, in this west country, the very home of the spirit of the apple tree! Now it is, or seems, all the more beautiful because of its lateness, and of an April of snow and sleet and east winds, the bitter feeling of which is hardly yet out of our blood. If I could recover the images of all the flowering apple trees I have ever looked delightedly at, adding those pictured by poets and painters, including that one beneath which Fiammetta is standing, forever, with that fresh glad face almost too beautiful for earth, looking out as from pink and white clouds of the multitudinous blossoms - if I could see all that, I could not find a match for one of the trees of to-day.

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