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Traits and Confidences
Traits and Confidences
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An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:
AN ENTOMOLOGICAL ADVENTURE
Irish properties are reported to have their drawbacks, and it is very possible that they may have—for their owners. For those who are not their owners, nor ever likely to become their owners, an Irish property—I can answer for it personally — is the most delectable of delectable play-grounds, or was so at a period a good deal nearer to the hale-and-hearty middle of the century than it is always pleasant in these days of its flagging dotage to remember. Boy or girl, it mattered not which you were, provided that you kept within certain prescribed boundaries—boundaries probably marked in your own mind with the natural and charming pomposity of youth as " our grounds," " our land "—within those limits you were free to roam, as you would, on foot or upon pony-back, unchecked and unfollowed even from afar by protesting maid or scandalized governess. Such, at least, was our own never-sufficiently-to-be-blessed experience.
Probably the highest heights of joy, the most transcendent depths of rapture, were only to be found upon properties whose inner circumvallation boasted of a bog; a moderately uncut bog; one rich in feathery tussocks and in bog holes of immeasurable depth, and unsurpassed capability in the way of fishing forth all sorts of slimy, crawling, black, and many-legged personages out of their oozy depths. Above all, a bog rich in an " esker," or heath-covered ridge, trending away, far as the eye could reach, into blue, immeasurable distances, never yet trodden by the feet of the explorer, but remaining always a region full of bewitching suggestions, of haunting mystery, of dim, untravelled possibilities. A region from which no amount of after-familiarity ever entirely succeeded in stripping away the glamour.
This last quintessence of joy was not, as it happened, in those days attainable by the young person whose experiences I am about to relate. For all that, she was content. Until larger hopes and more spacious possibilities have arisen to awaken discontent, the soul satisfies itself reasonably enough upon the lesser ones, or so philosophers, both in or out of short frocks, have at various ages of the world discovered.
By what good fortune for herself, by what ill-fortune for those whose duty it was to " tidy up " after her, the love of " creatures," of " natural history," as in more dignified years we term it, came to fall like a gift from the gods upon that particular short-frocked philosopher's path, I cannot now delay to inquire. Legends survive of feloniously introduced ladybirds, and treacherously concealed grasshoppers, which hopped in the dead hours of midnight upon nursery carpets, and even across the persons of innocently sleeping bed-fellows, but these, one must trust, are not true. One still darker tale survives of a small, but, I am assured, exceptionally clammy frog, which having been carried in a hot little hand till it could be carried no longer, was placed in the widely open neck-frill of a younger brother, which presented itself as a suitable receptacle, from whence it rapidly travelled first to the victim's neck, and next downhill over his entire remonstrating person, until it finally regained daylight and liberty somewhere in the neighbourhood of his shoes and socks.
Of these earlier misdoings all I can say is that the culprit herself has no recollection of them. Nine years old remains fixed in her mind as the period at which the propensity burst—literally and most unfiguratively burst— beyond farther hope of concealment, revealing itself not alone in overflowing buckets, baskets, tin pails, and similar receptacles, but, what was regarded as a great deal more scandalous, in bulging and discoloured pockets, out of which came creeping, crawling, buzzing, croaking, chirruping, and, no doubt, generally remonstrating gentry, not usually counted as part of " a good little girl's" natural properties or reasonable " pets."
By way of for a moment interrupting these biographical details, I may be allowed here to remark that nine years old has always seemed to me to be the really culminating moment, the true pinnacle of human ambition. At that favoured age babyhood, with its petty restrictions and humiliating sense of feebleness, is past and done with. The first horrors of irrational .panic—that chill, nipping dread of we know not quite what, which lurks in the blood of nearly every son and daughter of Eve—is also passed, or you pretend that it is, which comes to much the same thing in the end. On the other hand, the first premonitory chill of disillusion, and what is of still more importance, the first numbing sense of your own unaccountably imposed limitations, are both alike far off. Life spreads itself before you, large, and broad, and long, and sunny. Birds sing, insects buzz...
AN ENTOMOLOGICAL ADVENTURE
Irish properties are reported to have their drawbacks, and it is very possible that they may have—for their owners. For those who are not their owners, nor ever likely to become their owners, an Irish property—I can answer for it personally — is the most delectable of delectable play-grounds, or was so at a period a good deal nearer to the hale-and-hearty middle of the century than it is always pleasant in these days of its flagging dotage to remember. Boy or girl, it mattered not which you were, provided that you kept within certain prescribed boundaries—boundaries probably marked in your own mind with the natural and charming pomposity of youth as " our grounds," " our land "—within those limits you were free to roam, as you would, on foot or upon pony-back, unchecked and unfollowed even from afar by protesting maid or scandalized governess. Such, at least, was our own never-sufficiently-to-be-blessed experience.
Probably the highest heights of joy, the most transcendent depths of rapture, were only to be found upon properties whose inner circumvallation boasted of a bog; a moderately uncut bog; one rich in feathery tussocks and in bog holes of immeasurable depth, and unsurpassed capability in the way of fishing forth all sorts of slimy, crawling, black, and many-legged personages out of their oozy depths. Above all, a bog rich in an " esker," or heath-covered ridge, trending away, far as the eye could reach, into blue, immeasurable distances, never yet trodden by the feet of the explorer, but remaining always a region full of bewitching suggestions, of haunting mystery, of dim, untravelled possibilities. A region from which no amount of after-familiarity ever entirely succeeded in stripping away the glamour.
This last quintessence of joy was not, as it happened, in those days attainable by the young person whose experiences I am about to relate. For all that, she was content. Until larger hopes and more spacious possibilities have arisen to awaken discontent, the soul satisfies itself reasonably enough upon the lesser ones, or so philosophers, both in or out of short frocks, have at various ages of the world discovered.
By what good fortune for herself, by what ill-fortune for those whose duty it was to " tidy up " after her, the love of " creatures," of " natural history," as in more dignified years we term it, came to fall like a gift from the gods upon that particular short-frocked philosopher's path, I cannot now delay to inquire. Legends survive of feloniously introduced ladybirds, and treacherously concealed grasshoppers, which hopped in the dead hours of midnight upon nursery carpets, and even across the persons of innocently sleeping bed-fellows, but these, one must trust, are not true. One still darker tale survives of a small, but, I am assured, exceptionally clammy frog, which having been carried in a hot little hand till it could be carried no longer, was placed in the widely open neck-frill of a younger brother, which presented itself as a suitable receptacle, from whence it rapidly travelled first to the victim's neck, and next downhill over his entire remonstrating person, until it finally regained daylight and liberty somewhere in the neighbourhood of his shoes and socks.
Of these earlier misdoings all I can say is that the culprit herself has no recollection of them. Nine years old remains fixed in her mind as the period at which the propensity burst—literally and most unfiguratively burst— beyond farther hope of concealment, revealing itself not alone in overflowing buckets, baskets, tin pails, and similar receptacles, but, what was regarded as a great deal more scandalous, in bulging and discoloured pockets, out of which came creeping, crawling, buzzing, croaking, chirruping, and, no doubt, generally remonstrating gentry, not usually counted as part of " a good little girl's" natural properties or reasonable " pets."
By way of for a moment interrupting these biographical details, I may be allowed here to remark that nine years old has always seemed to me to be the really culminating moment, the true pinnacle of human ambition. At that favoured age babyhood, with its petty restrictions and humiliating sense of feebleness, is past and done with. The first horrors of irrational .panic—that chill, nipping dread of we know not quite what, which lurks in the blood of nearly every son and daughter of Eve—is also passed, or you pretend that it is, which comes to much the same thing in the end. On the other hand, the first premonitory chill of disillusion, and what is of still more importance, the first numbing sense of your own unaccountably imposed limitations, are both alike far off. Life spreads itself before you, large, and broad, and long, and sunny. Birds sing, insects buzz...
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