"I'm watching for the new heather, but it seems long in coming, and will be longer yet. There's the old stuff still on the bushes, but the colour's gone and it's the purple flower I want. Will you not be here to see it flush the hills? But it's months till then, and just now there's little here but snow, and the streams so fierce and heavy that it takes your breath away. I think it's the early morning that I like best, when there's hardly any light but what comes from the snow; and this morning, just at that hour, I was wakened by the stairs creaking, and there was my father going out, half-dressed, and I heard my mother cry out to me to stop him, for he'd taken the razor. We'd had peace for these last weeks, and I'd begun to hope he'd worn himself into quiet, and there he was again, rushing into the snow and the grey morning. It was like chasing a ghost across the fields, for there was no sound on the snow, and the trees looked like spectres that had never known the run of sap. And my mother stood by the gate holding a lantern that gave a little flame the morning mocked at. It was like a lamp showing the door of the underworld I'd rushed into. I came up with him at last, and he laughed at me. He had no razor, he said, and it's true he hadn't, but he'd chosen to frighten my mother with that lie. What are we to do with the man? He threatens to take his life, and if it wasn't for my mother, I think I'd let him do it; but I've got to stop him, and then he laughs at us. I was near knocking him down, but I've always kept my hands off him so far, and I hope I always may. But he's mad, though my mother will not have it. And he is still laughing at his joke. Is it cunning to put us off the scent, I'm wondering? "When I look back into my life, I see so many pictures of darkness; the night and the sound of his shambling feet coming home, the early morning and the creaking stairs, and my mother calling softly and telling me to stay in bed, for that was when I was young, and he had a spite against me; and the shadows in the kitchen when I did my work, and the moving shadow on the ceiling as my father prowled up and down. The darkness followed me when I went to school in the sun, and when I came back I knew it waited for me. If I went in mist or rain, there was nothing strange in that, for it was just the shadows going with me. Yet I'm exaggerating, for the hills always stood clear of all else, and were themselves and friends to me. Even you, who love them, cannot know what they have been. There's no good name I cannot give them--except one.