Fantasy literature; London (England) -- Fiction; Witches -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
She awoke because it was so beautiful outside, and because there was a
beautiful day coming. You could see the day secretly making preparations
behind a shining mist. She heard a sound of breathless singing, and the
whipping of stirred grass in the garden, the sound of some one
unbearably happy, dancing. Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad
before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like
getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach.
Sarah Brown went to her window. The newborn trembling slants of smoke
went up from the houses of the island. There was a sky of that quiet
design which suffices half a day unchanged. A garden of quite a good
many yards lay behind the house; it contained no potatoes or anything
useful, only long, very green grass, and a may tree, and a witch
dancing. The extraordinary music to which she was dancing was partly the
braying of a neighbouring donkey, and partly her own erratic singing.
She danced, as you may imagine, in a very far from grown-up way, rather
like a baby that has thought of a new funny way of annoying its Nana;
and she sang, too, like a child that inadvertently bursts into loud
tuneless song, because it is morning and yet too early to get up. A
little wandering of the voice, a little wandering of the feet.... The
may tree in the middle of the garden seemed to be her partner. A small
blot moved up and down the chequered trunk of the tree, and that was the
shadow of a grey squirrel, watching the dancing. The squirrel wore the
same fur as the two-and-a-half-guinea young lady wears, and sometimes it
looked with a tilted head at the witch, and sometimes it buried its face
in its hands and sat for a while shaken with secret laughter. There was
certainly something more funny than beautiful about the witch's dancing.
She laughed herself most of the time. She was wearing a mackintosh,
which was in itself rather funny, but her feet were bare.
A voice broke in: "Good for you, cully."
It was Sarah Brown's fellow-lodger leaning from her window.
The squirrel rippled higher up the may tree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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