1 8 MY DEVON YEAR 



And in the white Hght one must be very honest with 

 all things — for honesty is the spirit of such a day. It 

 is a time for thoroughness, for confession of error, for 

 rectification of wrong impressions as to form and 

 colour and other facts. Such an hour may show the 

 character of a man and gauge a little of his worth, a 

 little of his ambition. It is remorseless, this light — 

 remorseless as the ray of Truth itself; and some 

 recoil therefrom as they shrink from the shattering 

 of false but beautiful impressions ; and some face it, 

 and, setting certainties above all things, learn their 

 errors in this stern book, stand at once humiliated by 

 past mistakes, heartened before new facts that lift 

 their knowledge a step higher. 



The white light of February shows natural things 

 in their veritable relations each to each — the dead 

 wood and the lichen-growth, the oak-tree bough and 

 the crest of polypody fern that crowns it ; the mosses 

 that love green wood, and the mosses that love red 

 earth, and the mosses that love the old brick wall ; 

 the shapes of the seed-leaves everywhere sprouting ; 

 the way Nature performs that annual miracle of 

 removing her own products — her miles of fallen leaves, 

 her acres of withered fern, her dead trees, and the 

 empty nests of last year. In this naked hour the 

 processes pass under our eyes, and we perceive that 

 a whirl of change is going on in silence. Yet one can 

 almost feel the tremendous invisible powers at work 

 in this white light ; one can almost hear the roar of 



