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Page 24
"I need hardly say that the toy booth in a village fair tries me very
hard. It tried me in childhood, when I was often short of pence, and
when 'the Feast' came once a year. It never tried me more than on one
occasion, lately, when I was re-visiting my old home.
"It was deep Midsummer, and the Feast. I had children with me of course
(I find children, somehow, wherever I go), and when we got into the
fair, there were children of people whom I had known as children, with
just the same love for a monkey going up one side of a yellow stick and
coming down the other, and just as strong heads for a giddy-go-round on
a hot day and a diet of peppermint lozenges, as their fathers and
mothers before them. There were the very same names--and here and there
it seemed the very same faces--I knew so long ago. A few shillings were
indeed well expended in brightening those familiar eyes: and then there
were the children with me.... Besides, there really did seem to be an
unusually nice assortment of things, and the man was very intelligent
(in reference to his wares):.... Well, well! It was two o'clock P.M.
when we went in at one end of that glittering avenue of drums, dolls,
trumpets, accordions, workboxes, and what not; but what o'clock it was
when I came out at the other end, with a shilling and some coppers in
my pocket, and was cheered, I can't say, though I should like to have
been able to be accurate about the time, because of what followed.
"I thought the best thing I could do was to get out of the fair at
once, so I went up the village and struck off across some fields into a
little wood that lay near. (A favourite walk in old times.) As I turned
out of the booth, my foot struck against one of the yellow sticks of
the climbing monkeys. The monkey was gone, and the stick broken. It set
me thinking as I walked along.
"What an untold number of pretty and ingenious things one does (not
wear out in honourable wear and tear, but) utterly lose, and wilfully
destroy, in one's young days--things that would have given pleasure to
so many more young eyes, if they had been kept a little longer--things
that one would so value in later years, if some of them had survived
the dissipating and destructive days of Nurserydom. I recalled a young
lady I knew, whose room was adorned with knick-knacks of a kind I had
often envied. They were not plaster figures, old china, wax-work
flowers under glass, or ordinary ornaments of any kind. They were her
old toys. Perhaps she had not had many of them, and had been the more
careful of those she had. She had certainly been very fond of them, and
had kept more of them than any one I ever knew. A faded doll slept in
its cradle at the foot of her bed. A wooden elephant stood on the
dressing-table, and a poodle that had lost his bark put out a
red-flannel tongue with quixotic violence at a windmill on the opposite
corner of the mantelpiece. Everything had a story of its own. Indeed
the whole room must have been redolent with the sweet story of
childhood, of which the toys were the illustrations, or like a poem of
which the toys were the verses. She used to have children to play with
them sometimes, and this was a high honour. She is married now, and has
children of her own, who on birthdays and holidays will forsake the
newest of their own possessions to play with 'mamma's toys.'
"I was roused from these recollections by the pleasure of getting into
the wood.
"If I have a stronger predilection than my love for toys, it is my love
for woods, and, like the other, it dates from childhood. It was born
and bred with me, and I fancy will stay with me till I die. The
soothing scents of leaf-mould, moss, and fern (not to speak of
flowers)--the pale green veil in spring, the rich shade in summer, the
rustle of the dry leaves in autumn, I suppose an old woman may enjoy
all these, my dears, as well as you. But I think I could make 'fairy
jam' of hips and haws in acorn cups now, if any child would be
condescending enough to play with me. "_This_ wood, too, had
associations.
"I strolled on in leisurely enjoyment, and at last seated myself at the
foot of a tree to rest. I was hot and tired; partly with the mid-day
heat and the atmosphere of the fair, partly with the exertion of
calculating change in the purchase of articles ranging in price from
three farthings upwards. The tree under which I sat was an old friend.
There was a hole at its base that I knew well. Two roots covered with
exquisite moss ran out from each side, like the arms of a chair, and
between them there accumulated year after year a rich, though tiny
store of dark leaf-mould. We always used to say that fairies lived
within, though I never saw anything go in myself but wood-beetles.
There was one going in at that moment.
"How little the wood was changed! I bent my head for a few seconds,
and, closing my eyes, drank in the delicious and suggestive scents of
earth and moss about the dear old tree. I had been so long parted from
the place that I could hardly believe that I was in the old familiar
spot. Surely it was only one of the many dreams in which I had played
again beneath those trees! But when I re-opened my eyes there was the
same hole, and, oddly enough, the same beetle or one just like it. I
had not noticed till that moment how much larger the hole was than it
used to be in my young days.
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