It is one of many unanswered questions, good to ask because it has
no answer, only the suggestion of a train of thought: perhaps we
are never so receptive as when with folded hands we say simply,
"This is a great mystery." I watched and wondered until Jem
called, and I had to leave the rippling weir and the water's side,
and the wheel with its untold secret.
The miller's wife gave me tea and a crust of home-made bread, and
the miller's little maid sat on my knee while I told the sad tale
of a little pink cloud separated from its parents and teazed and
hunted by mischievous little airs. To-morrow, if I mistake not,
her garden will be wet with its tears, and, let us hope, point a
moral; for the tale had its origin in a frenzied chicken driven
from the side of an anxious mother, and pursued by a sturdy,
relentless figure in a white sun-bonnet.
The little maid trotted off, greatly sobered, to look somewhat
prematurely for the cloud's tears; and I climbed to my place at the
top of the piled-up sacks, and thence watched twilight pass to
starlight through my narrow peep, and, so watching, slept until
Jem's voice hailed me from Dreamland, and I went, only half awake,
across the dark fields home.
Autumn is here and it is already late. He has painted the hedges
russet and gold, scarlet and black, and a tangle of grey; now he
has damp brown leaves in his hair and frost in his finger-tips.
It is a season of contrasts; at first all is stir and bustle, the
ingathering of man and beast; barn and rickyard stand filled with
golden treasure; at the farm the sound of threshing; in wood and
copse the squirrels busied 'twixt tree and storehouse, while the
ripe nuts fall with thud of thunder rain.
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