Far Above Rubies Volume 1

Excerpt: The way to Berrie Down Hollow lay along a lane, winding and narrow: not a prosaic lane, bounded to right and left by low-cropped, unromantic hedges, and scanty banks covered with coarse wiry grass, where never a wild flower would dream of blooming, but a delicious lane, bordered by old elms and beech trees; where were smooth bits of turf, pleasantly suggestive of a gallop over the sward; a lane by the sides whereof trailed brambles and the dark-leaved ivy; a lane where the hawthorn in the sweet May-time, when it opened its earliest buds, stretched its white arms out across the grass, striving to touch the passer-by who idly paused to inhale its fragrance; a lane where twined in picturesque disorder wild bryony and traveller?s joy, dog-roses and honeysuckles, the woody nightshade and the greater bindweed (old man?s nightcap as the children irreverently call it); where the eye was refreshed by looking on soft cushions of moss and ferns, graceful, and drooping, and cool; where blossomed in their due season primroses and violets, the wild hyacinth, the blue speedwell, delicious clumps of birds-foot trefoil, the pink cranesbill, the wood strawberry and anemone, ground ivy, the ?hindering? knot grass, ?everywhere humble and everywhere green;? St. John?s Wort, that balm of the warrior wound; tufted vetch, the creeping cinquefoil, with many another wild flower, which in the early days little hands love to gather; which boyhood, and manhood, and middle age pass by unnoticed, but which come back fresh and bright as ever to the memory of the old man too feeble to totter away to the shady lane, to the warm sunny bank where the buds are springing, and the flowers blooming, and the lights and shadows flitting backwards and forwards, coming and going, coming and going just as they did half a century previously, when he was young and strong, and active like the best.