And Spring With Foliage And
Blossom Would Be With Us By And By, In A Month Or Two; Even Now
In
midwinter there was a foretaste of it, and it came to us first as a
delicious fragrance in the
Air at one spot beside a row of old
Lombardy poplars - an odour that to the child is like wine that maketh
the heart glad to the adult. Here at the roots of the poplars there
was a bed or carpet of round leaves which we knew well, and putting
the clusters apart with our hands, lo! there were the violets already
open - the dim, purple-blue, hidden violets, the earliest, sweetest, of
all flowers the most loved by children in that land, and doubtless in
many other lands.
There was more than time enough for us small children to feast on
violets and run wild in our forest; since for several weeks we were
encouraged to live out of doors as far away as we could keep from the
house where we were not wanted. For just then great alterations were
being made to render it habitable: new rooms were being added on to
the old building, wooden flooring laid over the old bricks and tiles,
and the half-rotten thatch, a haunt of rats and the home of centipedes
and of many other hybernating creeping things, was being stripped off
to be replaced by a clean healthy wooden roof. For me it was no
hardship to be sent away to make my playground in that wooded
wonderland.
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