Lark Rise to Candleford

There Laura spent many happy hours, supposed to be picking fruit for jam, but for the better part of the time reading or dreaming. One corner, overhung by a Samson tree and walled in with bushes and flowers, she called her 'green study'.

Twas a still, calm night and the moon's pale light Shone over hill and dale When friends mute with grief stood around the deathbed Of their loved, lost Lily Lyle. Heart as pure as forest lily Never knowing guile, Had its home within the bosom Of sweet Lily Lyle.

Candleford Green was but a small village and there were fields and meadows and woods all around it. As soon as Laura crossed the doorstep, she could see some of these. But mere seeing from a distance did not satisfy her; she longed to go alone far into the fields and hear the birds singing, the brooks tinkling, and the wind rustling through the corn, as she had when a child. To smell things and touch things, warm earth and flowers and grasses, and to stand and gaze where no one could see her, drinking it all in.

No, I be-ant expectin' nothin', but I be so yarnin

When I am dead and in my head And all my bones are are rotten, Take this book and think of me And mind I'm not forgotten.

One boy's a boy; two boys be half a boy, and three boys be no boy at all', ran the old country saying.

to make up in an hour for all their wasted yesterdays.

Many of the great eaters grew very stout in later life; but this caused them no uneasiness; they regarded their [Pg 390] expanding girth as proper to middle age. Thin people were not admired. However cheerful and energetic they might appear, they were suspected of 'fretting away their fat' and warned that they were fast becoming 'walking miseries'.

There is something exhilarating about pay-day, even when the pay is poor and already mortgaged for necessities. With

Traditions and customs which had lasted for centuries did not die out in a moment.