The Days of My Life: An AutobiographyOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
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The Days of My Life: An Autobiography
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret), 1828-1897
to be disturbed, I knew--and then I examined the room with its wainscot
pannels, its carved mantel-shelf, and its pannel pictures, hard flat
portraits, which had no pretension to the roundness or the breadth of
life, but were as level as the Cambridgeshire flats, and almost as much
like each other. And then I went to the further window, and coiled
myself up upon the bench within the curtains, to solace myself with my
own thoughts. The garden lay dark beneath, with shadowy bare trees here
and there, lifting up their branches to the sky, and some fantastic
little green-house, or summer-house, half way down, showing a dull
glimmer of glass under the boughs. But insensibly my eyes turned from
the garden and the darkness, to count the scattered lights in the
windows of this dark building, which marked its embrasures upon the sky
at my right hand. A light in a window is a strange lure to
imagination--I watched them with interest and pleasure--they were
unknown, yet they were neighbors--and it was pleasant from hearing the
wind without, and seeing the dark, to turn upon the glimmering tapers
with a certain friendly warmth and satisfaction, as though some one had
said good-night.
And so we were settled to our new beginning, and our new home.
THE THIRD DAY.
I was in the garden, where I almost lived in the sweet summer days in
those times of my youth; it was June, and I did not fear the windows of
Corpus, which looked out upon the trees with their numberless leaves,
the trees which were quite shelter enough for me. If I had begun to have
visions of the universal romance of youth, my thoughts were much too
exalted to think of vulgar fallings in love, and though I constantly
hailed as neighbors these kindly lights in the windows of the collegiate
buildings, I was troubled by no thought of the young gownsmen, the
possible possessors of the same; and so it came about that I went as
freely to the garden of our quaint old house, overlooked by the windows
of Corpus Christi College as I had been used to go in the garden of
Cottiswoode, which was not overlooked by anything within a dozen miles,
save the fruit trees in the orchard, and the great walnut by the house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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