Mary's Meadow, and Other Tales of Fields and Flowers

g to make us love our

or taking the best and leaving the rest, or helping ourselves first, or pushing forward, or praisin

ur as yourself when you want a thing very much; and Arthur says he believes it is particularly difficult if it is your

lds, and Father has only got a few; but there are two fields beyond Mary's Meadow which belong to Father, though the Old Squire wanted to buy them. Father would not sell t

law; and if going to law doesn't make it up, you appeal. They went to law, I know, for

Meadow. I think he thought that if we children were there, Saxon would frighten us, for I do not suppose he knew that we knew him. But Saxon used ofte

ing his teeth with rage. We think it looks as if he were laughing-like Mother Hubbard's dog, when she brought home his coffin, and he wasn't dead-but it really

hay while the sun shines, Saxon, my man. There's sma' sight o' young leddies and sweet cakes at hame for ye

early double. She wears a large hood, and carries a big basket, which she puts down outside the nursery door when she comes to tea with Bessy.

l, like they walnuts Butler tells us of as a zets down for desart. The Old Zquire he mostly eats ne'er a one now's teeth be so bad. But a counts them every night when's desart's done. And a keeps 'em till the karnels be mowldy

re and the Walnuts." He gets nuts, or anything, like shells or bits of flower-pots, that will break, and something to hit with, and when Arthur comes to "The karnels

man, and Mother could not help laughing too; but she did not li

d, and gave nothing away, except now and then a grand present of fruit to Lady Catherine, for which the old lady returned no thanks, but only a rude message to say that his peaches were over-ripe, and he had better have sent the grapes to the Infirmary. Adela asked-"W

have smooth plum-coloured coats and pale green cowls, and push up out of last year's dry leaves, or in August and September, when their hoods hav

. Another reason was the nightingale. There was one that used

ut the story doesn't end well, for he came there by gathering sticks on Sunday, and then scoffing about it, and he has been there ever since. But Mother made us a new fairy tale about the nightingale in

nd of course I had no fears about him. Indeed, I used to wish that it could happen that the Old Squire, riding after me as full of fury as King Padella in the Rose and the Ring, might set Saxon on me, as the lions were let loose to eat the Princess Rosalba. "Instead of devouring her with their great teeth, it was with kisses they gobbled her up. They licked her pretty feet, they nuzzled their noses in her lap," and she put her arms "round their ta

the mirror) at all like the picture of Rosalba in the Rose and the Ring. I was trying to see my feet as well as my hair, when I heard Arthur jumping the three steps in the middle of the p

uire, with a great-coat over his evening clothes, a

d threw open the window, and

t of the mist, and dark against its brightness I could see the

tree in the hedgerow sat the nightingale, singin