But the dreary half-year did come to an end.
How glad Tom was to see the last yellow leaves fluttering
before the cold wind! The dark afternoons and
the first December snow seemed to him far livelier
than the August sunshine; and that he might make himself
the surer about the flight of the days that were carrying
him homeward, he stuck twenty-one sticks deep in a
corner of the garden, when he was three weeks from
the holidays, and pulled one up every day with a great
wrench, throwing it to a distance with a vigor of will
which would have carried it to limbo, if it had been
in the nature of sticks to travel so far.
But it was worth purchasing, even at the heavy price
of the Latin Grammar, the happiness of seeing the
bright light in the parlor at home, as the gig passed
noiselessly over the snow-covered bridge; the happiness
of passing from the cold air to the warmth and the
kisses and the smiles of that familiar hearth, where
the pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons
were “first ideas” that it was no more
possible to criticise than the solidity and extension
of matter. There is no sense of ease like the
ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where
objects became dear to us before we had known the
labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only
an extension of our own personality; we accepted and
loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence
and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly,
that furniture of our early home might look if it were
put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery
scorns it; and is not the striving after something
better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic
that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy
a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes
the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven
knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections
had not a trick of twining round those old inferior
things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had
no deep immovable roots in memory. One’s
delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused
leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight
than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself
on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable
preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those
regulated minds who are free from the weakness of
any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable
superiority of qualities. And there is no better
reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that
it stirs an early memory; that it is no novelty in
my life, speaking to me merely through my present
sensibilities to form and color, but the long companion
of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when
joys were vivid.
Chapter II
The Christmas Holidays
Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy
face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion,
and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color
with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.
