The Golden Age

into space; and all the clear-swept heaven seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp. It was one of the first awakenings of the year. The earth stretched herself, s

responsive. Above, the sky was bluest of the blue; wide pools left by the winter’s floods flashed the colour back, true and brilliant; and the soft air thrilled with the germinating touch that seems to kindle something in my own small person as well as in the rash primrose already lurking in sheltered haunts. Out into the brimming sun-bathed world I sped, free of lessons, free of discipline and correction,

r had any desire for talk; the glow and the glory of existing

1

old?’ I aske

,’ said Charlotte with petulance. ‘Fancy wa

went through passages and up and down staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to invisible wayfarers. It sounds a poor sort of sport; and yet—to pass along busy streets of your own building, for ever ringing an

ere is he?’ I q

e ditch when[16] we get there, and he’s going to be a grizzly bear and spr

be surprised.’ But I could not help feeling that on th

mitigated grizzly. It was an understood thing, that whoever took upon himself to be a bear must eventually die, sooner or later, even if he were the eldest born; else, life would have been all strife and carnage, and the Age of Acorns

er thoughts until it was sucked dry and cast aside,—‘What would you do if you saw two lions i

should—I should—’ His boastful accents died

consideration; and, really, it would be

reflectively, ‘the lions would do all t

rejoined Charlotte, ‘they woul

ad one?’ said Edward. ‘The books don’t tell you a

any good lions,’

all the lions in the story-books are good lions. There was Androcles

observed Harold dubious

dward triumphantly. ‘But the question is,

ha,’ said Harold o

anyhow, and I’ll run on to that corner and be a lion,—I’ll be two lions, one on each side of the ro

close to you, and then you’ll be loose, and you’ll tear me in pieces, and m

1

d the call of the divine morning were high in my blood. Earth to earth! That was the frank note, the joyous summons of the day; and they could not but jar and seem artificial, these human discussions and pretences, when boon nature, reticent no more, was singing that full-throated song of hers that thrills and claims control of every fibre. The air was wine, the moist earth-smell wine, the lark’s song, the wafts from the cow-shed at top[20] of the field, the pant and smoke of a distant train—all were wine—or song, was it? or odour, this unity they all blent into? I had no words then to describe it, that earth-effluence of which I was

d with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I who whip round corners and bluster, relapse and evade, then rally and pursue! I can lead you the best and rarest dance of any; for I am the strong capricious one, the lord of misrule, and I alone

were natural and right and within the order[22] of things; but that human beings, with salient interests and active pursuits beckoning them on from every side, could thus—! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face, and think on no more. But this morning everything I met seemed to be accounted for and set in tune by t

s well enough; they were usually attached[23] to the body of Bill Saunders, the peerless bad boy of the village. Bill’s coveted booty, too, I could easily guess at that; it came from the Vicar’s store of biscuits, kept (as I knew) in a cupboard along with his official trappings. For a moment I hesitated; then I passed on my way. I protest I was not on Bill’s side; but then, neither was I on the Vicar’s, and there w

of air, a hawk[24] hung ominous; then, plummet-wise, dropped to the hedgerow, whence there rose, thin and shrill, a piteous voice of squealing. By the time I got there a whisk of feathers on the turf—like scattered playbills—was all that remained to

le son of hers, for his wasted aims, his cancelled ambitions, his whole career of usefulness cut suddenly short. But not a bit of it! Jubilant as ever, her song went bubbling on, and ‘Death-in-Life’—and again, ‘Life-in-Death,’ were its alternate burde

t I knew; then dropped, subsided, and slunk away into nothingness. I raised my eyes, and before me, grim and lichened, stood the ancient whipping-post of the village; its sides fretted with the initials of a generation that scorned its mute lesson, but still clipped by the stout rusty shackles that had tethered the wrists of such of tha

greatly coveting tadpoles, and top-heavy with the eagerness of possession, had fallen into the pond. This, in itself, was nothing; but on attempting to sneak in by the back-door, he had rendered up his duckweed-bedabbled person into the hands of an aunt, and had been promptly sent off to bed; and this, on a holid