Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even
when the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a
child's tooth.
Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in a
real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothing
but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest of
the hedges. They have no little hand in the realities of cultivation,
but wild growths give them blackberries. Pale are the joys of nutting
beside those of haymaking, but at least they are something.
Harvests apart, Spring, not Autumn, should make a childhood of memories
for the future. In later Autumn, life is speeding away, ebbing, taking
flight, a fugitive, taking disguises, hiding in the dry seed, retreating
into the dark. The daily progress of things in Spring is for children,
who look close. They know the way of moss and the roots of ivy, they
breathe the breath of earth immediately, direct. They have a sense of
place, of persons, and of the past that may be remembered but cannot be
recaptured. Adult accustomed eyes cannot see what a child's eye sees of
the personality of a person; to the child the accidents of voice and look
are charged with separate and unique character. Such a sense of place as
he got in a day within some forest, or in a week by some lake, so that a
sound or odour can bring it back in after days, with a shock--even such a
sense of single personality does a little watchful girl get from the
accents, the turns of the head, the habits of the hands, the presence of
a woman.
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