When the shadow
extended only to a little way from the tree, the clouds came and covered
the sun, and there were no more shadows, only one great one of the clouds.
Then the frost shone out in the shape of the vanished shadow. It lay at a
little distance from the tree, because the tree having been only partially
lopped, some great stumps of boughs held it up from the ground, and thus,
when the sun was low, his light had shone a little way through beneath, as
well as over the trunk.
My reader needs not be afraid; I am not going to "moralise this spectacle
with a thousand similes." I only tell it him as a very pretty phenomenon.
But I confess I walked on moralising it. Any new thing in nature--I mean
new in regard to my knowledge, of course--always made me happy; and I was
full of the quiet pleasure it had given me and of the thoughts it had
brought me, when, as I was getting over a stile, whom should I see in the
next field, coming along the footpath, but the lady who had made herself so
disagreeable about Theodora. The sight was rather a discord in my feeling
at that moment; perhaps it would have been so at any moment. But I prepared
myself to meet her in the strength of the good humour which nature had just
bestowed upon me.
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