THE PRIMROSE—GIRLHOOD. 
25 
HAT tall white house,—what a place it holds in my fond 
recollection! It was perfectly an old parsonage, and 
E behind it lay a garden larger than our city orchard, 
sloping gently down, with a profusion of fruit and 
flowers, bounded by high walls, and the central walk 
terminating in a door, beyond which lay the scene of our 
greatest enjoyment. A narrow slip of grass, fringed with 
osiers, and alders, and willows, alone separated the wall 
from a very clear, lovely stream, which, winding half round an extensive 
common, turned a mill. This small river abounded with fish, and we 
soon became smart anglers; besides which, on creeping to some distance 
by a path of our own discovery, we could cross the stream on a movable 
plank, and take a wide range through the country. This removal was 
a double resource; it invigorated my bodily frame, until I outgrew and 
out-bloomed every girl of my age in the neighbourhood, while really 
laying a foundation for many years of uninterrupted health, and a 
constitution to defy the change of climate for which I was destined; 
while it won me from the sickening, enervating habit of sedentary en¬ 
joyment over the pages of a book; which, added to the necessary studies 
and occupations, was relaxing alike the tone of the bodily and mental 
frame. From the polluted works of man I was drawn to the glorious 
works of God; and never did bird of the air, or beast of the field, more 
luxuriate in the pure bright elements of nature than I did. All the 
poetical visions of liberty that had floated in my brain seemed now 
realised; all pastoral descriptions faded before the actual enjoyment of 
rural life. Sometimes wreathing garlands of wild flowers, reclined on 
a sunny bank, while a flock of sheep strolled around, and the bold little 
lambs came to peep in our faces, and then gallop away in pretended 
alarm; sometimes tearing our clothes to tatters in an ardent hunt for 
the sweet filberts that hung high above our heads, on trees well fortified 
behind breast-works of bramble and thorn; sometimes cultivating the 
friendship, while we quaffed the milk, of the good-natured cows under 
the dairymaid’s operation, whose breath I was instructed to inhale. All 
was freedom, mirth, and peace. 
Personal Recollections. 
