It contains within it a vague yet poignant happiness, a rich and unknown experience.  It is the nearest I ever come to a sense of pre-existence; and I have sometimes wondered if it might not be, not perhaps my own pre-existence, but some inherited recollection of happiness in which I myself had no part, but which was part of the mind of one, or of many, from whom I derive my origin.  If limbs and features, qualities and desires, are derived from one’s ancestors, why should one not also derive a touch of their happy dreams, their sweet remembrances?

The first time it ever came to me was when we were taken, quite as small children, to a little cottage which stood in a clearing of a great pine-wood near Wellington College.  I suppose that the cottage was really older than the wood; it was guarded by great sprawling laurels, and below the house was a privet-hedged garden, sheltered all round by the pines, with a stream at the foot.  The sun lay very warm on the vegetable beds and orchard trees, and there was a row of hives—­not painted cupboards such as one now sees, but big egg-shaped things made of a rope of twisted straw—­round which on warm days the humming bees made a low musical note, that rose and fell as the numbers increased or diminished.  I suppose my nurse went to buy honey there—­we called it The Honey-woman’s Cottage.  I dimly remember an old, smiling, wrinkled woman opening the door to us, summoning my nurse in to a mysterious talk, and inviting us to go into the garden meanwhile.  The whole proceeding was intensely mysterious and beautiful.  Through the red pine stems one could see the sandy soil rising and falling in low ridges, strewn with russet needles.  Down below, nearer to the stream, a tough green sword-grass grew richly; and beyond lay the deep wood, softly sighing, and containing all sorts of strange scents and haunting presences.  In the garden there was a penetrating aromatic smell from the box-hedges and the hot vegetable-beds.  We wandered about, and it used to seem to me, I remember, like the scenes in which some of Grimm’s fairy-tales were enacted I suppose that the honey-woman was the wife of a woodman and was a simple soul enough; but there was something behind it all; she knew more than she would say.  Strange guests drew nigh to the cottage at nightfall, and the very birds of the place had sad tales to tell.  But it was not that I connected it with anything definite—­it was just the sense of something narrowly eluding me, which was there, but which I could not quite perceive.  There were other places, too, that gave me the same sense—­one a big dark pool in the woods, with floating water-lilies; it was there, too, that mysterious presence; and it was to be experienced also at the edge of a particular covert, a hanging wood that fell steeply from the road, where the ferns glittered with a metallic light and the flies buzzed angrily in the thicket.