Boys -- Juvenile fiction; Fantasy literature; Nature -- Juvenile fiction; Self-reliance -- Juvenile fiction
There was not in all that land, nor perhaps in all the wide world, a
happier little boy than Martin, when after waking from his sleep and
dream he dressed himself for the first time in that new suit, and went
out from the cave into the morning sunlight. He then felt the comfort of
such clothes, for they were softer than the finest, softest down or silk
to his skin, and kept him warm when it was cold, and cool when it was
hot, and dry when it rained on him, and the earth could not soil them,
nor the thorns tear them; and above everything they were the most
beautiful clothes ever seen. Their colour was a deep moss green, or so
it looked at a little distance, or when seen in the shade, but in the
sunshine it sparkled as if small, shining, many-coloured beads had been
sewn in the cloth; only there were no beads; it was only the shining
threads that made it sparkle so, like clean sand in the sun. When you
looked closely at the cloth, you could see the lovely pattern woven in
it--small leaf and flower, the leaves like moss leaves, and the flowers
like the pimpernel, but not half so big, and they were yellow and red
and blue and violet in colour.
But there were many, many things besides the lovely clothes to make him
contented and happy. First, the beautiful woman of the hills who loved
and cherished him and made him call her by the sweet name of "mother" so
many times every day that he well nigh forgot she was not his real
mother. Then there was the great stony hillside on which he now lived
for a playground, where he could wander all day among the rocks,
overgrown with creepers and strange sweet-smelling flowers he had never
seen on the plain below. The birds and butterflies he saw there were
different from those he had always seen; so were the snakes which he
often found sleepily coiled up on the rocks, and the little swift
lizards. Even the water looked strange and more beautiful than the water
in the plain, for here it gushed out of the living rock, sparkling like
crystal in the sun, and was always cold when he dipped his hands in it
even on the hottest days. Perhaps the most wonderful thing was the
immense distance he could see, when he looked away from the hillside
across the plain and saw the great dark forest where he had been, and
the earth stretching far, far away beyond.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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