In October there was nutting--best of all the new delights, perhaps--when she wandered through the hazel coppices and shook the smooth boughs until the ripe nuts pattered down on the damp, woodland earth. Nutting was no roadside adventure. She really penetrated into the heart of the woods and with her companions would peep out half-affrighted by the lips of the October leaves along the glades, half-afraid of the giant beeches with their bare gray branches twisted to the likeness of faces and figures. She and her playmates would peep out from the hazel coppice and dart across the mossy way out of the keeper's eye, and lose themselves in the dense covert and point with breathless whisper to a squirrel or scurrying dormouse. Home again in the silvery mists or moaning winds, home again with bags of nuts slung across shoulders, to await the long winter evenings and fireside pleasures. Jenny was allowed to celebrate her ninth birthday by a glorious tea-party in the kitchen, when little girls in clean pinafores and little boys in clean collars stumped along the flagged passage and sat down to tea and munched buns and presented Jenny with dolls' tea-services and pop-guns and Michaelmas daisies with stalks warm from the tight clasp of warm hands. She grew to love her Aunt Carrie and Uncle James with the quiet voice and thin, damp hair. Winter went by to the ticking of clocks and patter of rain. But there was snow after Christmas and uproarious snow-balling and slides in Galton High Street. There was always a fine crackling fire in the kitchen, and a sleek tabby cat, and copper kettles singing on the hob. There was Ethel's love affair with the grocer's assistant to talk and giggle over amid the tinkle and clatter of washing up the tea-things. And then in March Mrs. Threadgale caught cold and died quite suddenly; and Jenny put some white violets on her grave and wore a black dress and went home to Islington. The effect of this wonderful visit was not much more permanent than the surprise of a new picture-book. Galton had meant not so much a succession of revelations as a volley of sensations. She was sad at leaving the country; she missed the affection of her uncle and aunt. She missed the easy sway she had wielded over everybody at Galton. But she had very little experience to carry back to Hagworth Street. One would like to say she carried the memory of that childish wondertime right through her restless life, but, actually, she never remembered much about it. It very soon became merely a vague interval between two long similarities of existence, like a break in a row of houses that does not admit one to anything more than an added space of sky. She never communed with elves, or, like young Blake, saw God's forehead pressed against the window-pane. Jenny was no mystic of nature, and the roar of humanity would always move her more than the singing of waves and forest leaves.