HERE AND THERE; OR True Tales of Country Life. BY EDITH MARY. "Pure are the grains of gold in the turbid stream of Ganges, TUPPER, JOHN LONDON: F. SHAW AND CO., PATERNOSTER ROW, & SOUTHAMPTON ROW. MDCCCLXI 256.4.540 INTRODUCTION. IN turning over the wondrous book of memory, my eye rested on certain wild-flowers, which retained their delicate tints and beautiful pencillings after they had been pressed between these pages for many, many long years. I carefully spread them before me for nearer inspection, and thought I smelt a perfume, sweet and lingering. I contrasted them with the flowers of richer hue, nurtured in the stove-house and tended in the conservatory, and believed they suffered not by comparison. I looked upon them with pleasure-as a hidden treasure suddenly found. I took them with the hand of tenderness, and, without paint ing or gilding, sat down, as the happy child does on the first May holiday, with my wild-flowers before me, and sought to wreath them into a garland, only tying them together HERE and THERE with a thread of my own spinning. HERE AND THERE; OB, True Tales of Country Life. ; CHAPTER I. "Breathes there a man with soul so dead, This is my own-my native land?" FAR along, through the fertile county of Sussex, stretches a long chain of undulating hills, called the South Downs. Let us in imagination be there, and look on the beautiful prospect, as the eye travels far, far away, to where the blue of ocean meets the mist of clouds; or wanders from east to west, marking how gently many a valley sleeps between hills that rise on either side, clothed with rich wood to their very summit; while little villages, with their old churches (nearly hidden by the dark pine-fir and yew), nestle in quiet nooks at their base; and life-giving streams meander through the rich pastures below. Here and there are fields, now filled with the golden blossom of the cowslip, for it is early summer, when all nature contributes to give her sweetest scents to the gale, and most varied colours to the scene. 2 B |