Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for ChildrenKingsley, Charles
History
Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children
Kingsley, Charles
Geology -- Juvenile literature; Natural history -- Juvenile literature
might learn the laws of Lady Why, and love them for her sake, and teach
them to all mankind. And so you, like the plants and animals, will get
your deserts exactly, without competing and struggling for existence as
they do.
And all this has come out of looking at the hay-field and the wild moor.
Why not? There is an animal in you, and there is a man in you. If the
animal gets the upper hand, all your character will fall back into wild
useless moor; if the man gets the upper hand, all your character will be
cultivated into rich and fertile field. Choose.
Now come down home. The haymakers are resting under the hedge. The
horses are dawdling home to the farm. The sun is getting low, and the
shadows long. Come home, and go to bed while the house is fragrant with
the smell of hay, and dream that you are still playing among the
haycocks. When you grow old, you will have other and sadder dreams.
CHAPTER XI--THE WORLD'S END
Hullo! hi! wake up. Jump out of bed, and come to the window, and see
where you are.
What a wonderful place!
So it is: though it is only poor old Ireland. Don't you recollect that
when we started I told you we were going to Ireland, and through it to
the World's End; and here we are now safe at the end of the old world,
and beyond us the great Atlantic, and beyond that again, thousands of
miles away, the new world, which will be rich and prosperous, civilised
and noble, thousands of years hence, when this old world, it may be, will
be dead, and little children there will be reading in their history books
of Ancient England and of Ancient France, as you now read of Greece and
Rome.
But what a wonderful place it is! What are those great green things
standing up in the sky, all over purple ribs and bars, with their tops
hid in the clouds?
Those are mountains; the bones of some old world, whose poor bare sides
Madam How is trying to cover with rich green grass.
And how far off are they?
How I should like to walk up to the top of that one which looks quite
close.
You will find it a long walk up there; three miles, I dare say, over
black bogs and banks of rock, and up corries and cliffs which you could
not climb. There are plenty of cows on that mountain: and yet they look
so small, you could not see them, nor I either, without a glass. That
long white streak, zigzagging down the mountain side, is a roaring
cataract of foam five hundred feet high, full now with last night's rain;
but by this afternoon it will have dwindled to a little thread; and to-
morrow, when you get up, if no more rain has come down, it will be gone.
Madam How works here among the mountains swiftly and hugely, and
sometimes terribly enough; as you shall see when you have had your
breakfast, and come down to the bridge with me.
But what a beautiful place it is! Flowers and woods and a lawn; and what
is that great smooth patch in the lawn just under the window?
Is it an empty flower-bed?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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