Six to Sixteen: A Story for GirlsEwing, Juliana Horatia
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Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls
Ewing, Juliana Horatia
England -- Juvenile fiction; Family life -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction
I can very clearly remember the sight of my great-grandfather pacing
slowly up and down the tiny garden at The Vine, his hands behind him,
and followed sedately by Thomas. Now and then he would stop to gaze,
with infinite contentment in his eyes, at the delicate blue-grey mist
behind the leafless trees (which in that spring sunshine were, no doubt,
of much more complex and beautiful colour to him than mere brown), or
drinking in the blue of the scillas in the border with a sigh of
satisfaction. When he paused, Thomas would pause; as he feasted his
eyes, Thomas would rub his head against his master's legs, and stretch
his own. When Elspeth had cooked the fish, and my great-grandmother had
made the tea and arranged the flowers on the table, they would come in
together and condescend to their breakfasts, with the same air about
them both of having no responsibility in life but to find out sunny
spots and to enjoy themselves.
My great-grandfather's most charming paintings were sketches of flowers.
Ordinary stiff flower-paintings are of all paintings the most
uninteresting, I think; but his were of a very different kind. Each
sketch was a sort of idyll. Indeed, he would tell me stories of each as
he showed them.
Long as my great-grandfather had lived, he was never a robust man, and
Elspeth's chief ideas on the subject of his sketches bore reference to
the colds he had caught, and the illnesses he had induced, by sitting in
the east winds or lying on damp grass to do this or that sketch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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