You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge
Flat this sad November day? Well, I do not deny
that the moor looks somewhat dreary, though dull it
need never be. Though the fog is clinging to
the fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till
you cannot see as far as Minley Corner, hardly as
far as Bramshill woods—and all the Berkshire
hills are as invisible as if it was a dark midnight—yet
there is plenty to be seen here at our very feet.
Though there is nothing left for you to pick, and
all the flowers are dead and brown, except here and
there a poor half-withered scrap of bottle-heath,
and nothing left for you to catch either, for the
butterflies and insects are all dead too, except one
poor old Daddy-long-legs, who sits upon that piece
of turf, boring a hole with her tail to lay her eggs
in, before the frost catches her and ends her like
the rest: though all things, I say, seem dead,
yet there is plenty of life around you, at your feet,
I may almost say in the very stones on which you tread.
And though the place itself be dreary enough, a sheet
of flat heather and a little glen in it, with banks
of dead fern, and a brown bog between them, and a
few fir-trees struggling up—yet, if you
only have eyes to see it, that little bit of glen is
beautiful and wonderful,—so beautiful and
so wonderful and so cunningly devised, that it took
thousands of years to make it; and it is not, I believe,
half finished yet.
How do I know all that? Because a fairy told
it me; a fairy who lives up here upon the moor, and
indeed in most places else, if people have but eyes
to see her. What is her name? I cannot
tell. The best name that I can give her (and
I think it must be something like her real name, because
she will always answer if you call her by it patiently
and reverently) is Madam How. She will come
in good time, if she is called, even by a little child.
And she will let us see her at her work, and, what
is more, teach us to copy her. But there is another
fairy here likewise, whom we can hardly hope to see.
Very thankful should we be if she lifted even the
smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for
a moment if it were but her finger tip—so
beautiful is she, and yet so awful too. But
that sight, I believe, would not make us proud, as
if we had had some great privilege. No, my dear
child: it would make us feel smaller, and meaner,
and more stupid and more ignorant than we had ever
felt in our lives before; at the same time it would
make us wiser than ever we were in our lives before—that
one glimpse of the great glory of her whom we call
Lady Why.
But I will say more of her presently. We must
talk first with Madam How, and perhaps she may help
us hereafter to see Lady Why. For she is the
servant, and Lady Why is the mistress; though she has
a Master over her again—whose name I leave
for you to guess. You have heard it often already,
and you will hear it again, for ever and ever.
Copyrights
Madam How and Lady Why from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
