Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
"My dear children," I said, "we must all pray to God for his Spirit,
and then we shall feel just as we ought to feel. It is not for anyone
to say to himself how he ought to feel at any given moment; still less
for one man to say to another how he ought to feel; that is in the
former case to do as St. Paul says he had learned to give up doing--to
judge our own selves, which ought to be left to God; in the latter case
it is to do what our Lord has told us expressly we are not to do--to
judge other people. You get your bonnet, Wynnie, and come out with me.
I am going to explore a little of this desert island upon which we have
been cast away. And you, Connie, just to please Wynnie, must try and go
to sleep again."
Wynnie ran for her bonnet, a little afraid perhaps that I was going to
talk seriously to her, but showing no reluctance anyhow to accompany me.
Now I wonder whether it will be better to tell what we saw, or only
what we talked about, and give what we saw in the shape in which we
reported it to Connie, when we came back into her room, bearing, like
the spies who went to search the land, our bunch of grapes, that is, of
sweet news of nature, to her who could not go to gather them for
herself. It think it will be the best plan to take part of both plans.
When we left the door of the house, we went up the few steps of a stair
leading on to the downs, against and amidst, and indeed _in_, the
rocks, buttressing the sea-edge of which our new abode was built. A
life for a big-winged angel seemed waiting us upon those downs. The
wind still blew from the west, both warm and strong--I mean
strength-giving--and the wind was the first thing we were aware of. The
ground underfoot was green and soft and springy, and sprinkled all over
with the bright flowers, chiefly yellow, that live amidst the short
grasses of the downs, the shadows of whose unequal surface were now
beginning to be thrown east, for the sun was going seawards. I stood
up, stretched out my arms, threw back my shoulders and my head, and
filled my chest with a draught of the delicious wind, feeling
thereafter like a giant refreshed with wine. Wynnie stood apparently
unmoved amidst the life-nectar, thoughtful, and turning her eyes hither
and thither.
"That makes me feel young again," I said.
"I wish it would make me feel old then," said Wynnie.
"What do you mean, my child?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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