CHAPTER IX.
A SPRING CHAPTER.
More especially now in my old age, I find myself "to a lingering motion
bound." I would, if I might, tell a tale day by day, hour by hour,
following the movement of the year in its sweet change of seasons. This
may not be, but I will indulge myself now so far as to call this a spring
chapter, and so pass to the summer, when my reader will see why I have
called my story "The Seaboard Parish."
I was out one day amongst my people, and I found two precious things:
one, a lovely little fact, the other a lovely little primrose. This was
a pinched, dwarfish thing, for the spring was but a baby herself, and so
could not mother more than a brave-hearted weakling. The frost lay all
about it under the hedge, but its rough leaves kept it just warm enough,
and hardly. Now, I should never have pulled the little darling; it would
have seemed a kind of small sacrilege committed on the church of nature,
seeing she had but this one; only with my sickly cub at home, I felt
justified in ravening like a beast of prey. I even went so far in my greed
as to dig up the little plant with my fingers, and bear it, leaves and all,
with a lump of earth about it to keep it alive, home to my little woman--a
present from the outside world which she loved so much.
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