270 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



Or she is in the attic, chair and table by the window, 

 and a disused bedstead and a hnen-press (her bookcase) 

 behind : 



' Amaryllis went straight to the window and knelt down. 

 She brought a handful of violets, fresh-gathered, to place 

 in the glass which she kept there for her flowers. The 

 window was cut in the thick wall, and formed a niche, 

 where she had always had a tumbler ready — a common 

 glass tumbler, she could not afford a vase. 



' They were the white wild violets, the sweetest of all, 

 gathered while the nightingale was singing his morning 

 song in the April sunshine — a song the world never listens 

 to, more delicious than his evening notes, for the sunlight 

 helps him, and the blue of the heavens, the green leaf, and 

 the soft wind — all the soul of spring. 



' White wild violets, a dewdrop as it were of flower, 

 tender and delicate, growing under the great hawthorn 

 hedge, by the mosses and among the dry, brown leaves of 

 last year, easily overlooked unless you know exactly where 

 to go for them. She had a bunch for her neck, and a 

 large bunch for her niche. They would have sunk and 

 fallen into the glass, but she hung them by their chins 

 over the edge of the tumbler, with their stalks in the 

 water. Then she sat down in the old chair at the table, 

 and rested her head on her hand. 



' Except where she did this every day, and so brushed 

 it, a thin layer of dust had covered the surface (there was 

 no cloth) and had collected on her portfolio, thrust aside 

 and neglected. Dust on the indiarubber, dust on the 

 cake of Indian ink, dust invisible on the smooth surface 

 of the pencils, dust in the little box of vine charcoal. 



' The hoarse baying of the hungry wolves around the 

 house had shaken the pencil from her fingers — Siberian 

 wolves they were, racing over the arid deserts of debt, 

 large and sharp-toothed, ever increasing in number and 

 ferocity, ready to tear the very door down. There are 

 no wolves like those debt sends against a house. 



' Every knock at the door, every strange footstep up 



