Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 1).djvu/384

 halo of parental awe, no parental authority or infallibility.

I had never in all my life heard a musical instrument. At the ball there would be a band. A band was several musical instruments playing all together. What could that be like? Would it resemble several people talking at once? That would be horribly confusing. But it could not be like several people talking together, for people spoke of a band as a source of fine pleasure. Would a band of several instruments playing at one time be like a particoloured card spun round? Hardly; for that only confused the colours, so long as they could be known to be separate colours, and only made a dull stain when they mingled in one tint.

My first care was to keep my intention to myself. My second was to survey the ground of future enterprise. There was no difficulty about either of these precautions. I had merely to hold my tongue and to walk to Trafford Manor along a beautiful, undulating, winding, wooded road which passed by our modest gate, and before the stately portal of the great house.

The beauty of Trafford Manor was renowned in all the south, and the owner was proud of his grounds and opened them to all who chose to see them.

One morning, to the astonishment of my cousin Nellie, I announced my intention of going for a long walk. She was delighted, crammed my pockets full of the best good things in the larder, and declared that she should resent seeing me before dinner.

That whole day I spent in the Trafford demesne. Surely nowhere was scene more fitted for a fairy fête. It was mid April, and clear and sunny weather. The air was full of fresh spices of the swelling buds and of the dainty, delicate, flat leaves already unsheathed and glittering moist and green in the flowing air. It was rapture to live and breathe, and heaven to know as much and no more of the world of things than books taught, no more than enough to set the spirit dreaming. All the senses brought fuel for poetry, if the sacred flame fluttered inside. As yet the trees were only misty with verdure. The depths in depth of vestal green in the woods took the eye into such enchanted bowers of the imagination, it was like praying, to stand and listen to the soft, ample murmurs of the multitudinous leaves as the broad air came by them out of the opening south.

In that far off Bracken Glen I often knew promptings towards the spirit of the heather and the glen and the skies. But then I felt Nature spoke a language I did not understand, which no one about me seemed to hear. In the midst of my most ecstatic trances I recalled myself by conceiving what a poor opinion John Jones, Esquire, of the soddened book-keeping, would hold of me if he knew that I was wasting time in hearkening to fancy instead of those pipes of wine which never knew rest in the day-book, journal, or ledger, or trying to remember thirteen times, or endeavouring at all events to trisect the angle at which the brown ground of the bluff bit through the verdure of the hill to the gash where the stream gushed forth through ragged rocks on its