【英文原著类】MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY(豪夫人和怀女士).pdf

MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY
MADAM HOW AND
LADY WHY
By Charles Kingsley
1
MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY
CHAPTER I
—THE GLEN
You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge Flat this sad
November day? Well, I do not deny that the moor looks somewhat
dreary, though dull it need never be. Though the fog is clinging to the
fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till you cannot see as far as
Minley Corner, hardly as far as Bramshill woods--and all the Berkshire
hills are as invisible as if it was a dark midnight--yet there is plenty to be
seen here at our very feet. Though there is nothing left for you to pick,
and all the flowers are dead and brown, except here and there a poor half-
withered scrap of bottle-heath, and nothing left for you to catch either, for
the butterflies and insects are all dead too, except one poor old Daddy-
long-legs, who sits upon that piece of turf, boring a hole with her tail to
lay her eggs in, before the frost catches her and ends her like the rest:
though all things, I say, seem dead, yet there is plenty of life around you,
at your feet, I may almost say in the very stones on which you tread. And
though the place itself be dreary enough, a sheet of flat heather and a little
glen in it, with banks of dead fern, and a brown bog between them, and a
few fir-trees struggling up--yet, if you only have eyes to see it, that little
bit of glen is beautiful and wonderful,--so beautiful and so wonderful and
so cunningly devised, that it took thousands of years to make it; and it is
not, I believe, half finished yet.
How do I know all that? Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who lives
up here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if people have but
eyes to see her. What is her name? I cannot tell. The best name that I
can give her (and I think it must be something like her real name, because
she will always answer if you call her by it patiently and reverently) is
Madam How. She e in good time, if she is