Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

“ It is the most absurd thing in the world that Salemina, Francesca, and I should be in Ireland together.
That any three spinsters should be fellow-travellers is not in itself extraordinary, and so our former journeyings in England and Scotland could hardly be described as eccentric in any way; but now that I am a matron and Francesca is shortly to be married, it is odd, to say the least, to see us cosily ensconced in a private sitting-room of a Dublin hotel, the table laid for three, and not a vestige of a man anywhere to be seen. ”

“ Life without you is like a stenographic report of a dull sermon; with you it is by turns a dramatic story, a poem, and a romance. Sometimes it is a penny-dreadful, as when you deliberately leave your luggage on an express train going south, enter another standing upon a side track, and embark for an unknown destination. I watched you from an upper window of the Junction Hotel, but could not leave Benella to argue with you. When your respected husband and lover have charge of you, you will not be allowed such pranks, I warrant you. ”

“ This is the happy-go-lucky Irish philosophy, and there is mixed with it a deal of simple trust in God.
How many exiles and wanderers, both those who have no fortune and those who have failed to win it, dream of these cabin rows, these sweet-scented boreens with their 'banks of furze unprofitably gay,' these leaking thatches with the purple loosestrife growing in their ragged seams, and, looking backward across the distance of time and space, give the humble spot a tender thought, because after all it was in their dear native isle! ”

“ When does an artist ever fail to see pictures? I have loved Salemina always, even when she used to part her hair in the middle and wear spectacles; but that is the first time I ever wanted to paint her, with the firelight shining on the soft, restful greys and violets of her dress, and Broona in her arms. Of course, if a woman is ever to be lovely at all, it will be when she is holding a child. ”

“ In day dress she has always been inclined ever so little to a primness and severity that suggest old-maidishness. In her low gown of pale grey, with all her silver hair waved softly, she is unexpectedly lovely,—her face softened, transformed, and magically 'brought out' by the whiteness of her shoulders and slender throat. Not an ornament, not a jewel, will she wear; and she is right to keep the nunlike simplicity of style which suits her so well, and which holds its own even in the vicinity of Francesca's proud and glowing young beauty. ”

“ Perhaps you might be a doubter, with no eyes for the 'dim kingdom'; perhaps you might gaze for ever, and never be able to see a red-capped fiddler, fiddling under a blossoming sloe bush. You might even see him, and then indulge yourself in a fit of common-sense or doubt of your own eyes, in which case the wee dancers would never flock to the sound of the fiddle or gather on the fairy ring. This is the reason that I shall never take you to Knockma, to Glen Ailna, or especially to the hyacinth wood, which is a little plantation near the ruin of a fort. ”

“ There will be a thorn hedge struggling with and conquering a grey stone wall; then a golden gorse bush struggling with and conquering the thorn; seeking the sun, it knows no restraints, and creeping through the barriers of green and white and grey, it fairly hurls its yellow splendours in great blazing patches along the wayside. In dazzling glory, in richness of colour, there is nothing in nature that we can compare with this loveliest and commonest of all wayside weeds. The gleaming wealth of the Klondike would make a poor showing beside a single Irish hedgerow ”

“ England was our first volume, Scotland our second, and here we are, if you please, about to live a third volume in Ireland. We fall in love, we marry and are given in marriage, we promote and take part in international alliances, but when the curtain goes up again, our accumulations, acquisitions—whatever you choose to call them—have disappeared. We are not to the superficial eye the spinster-philanthropist, the bride to be, the wife of a year; we are the same old Salemina, Francesca and Penelope. It is so dramatic that my husband should be called to America; as a woman I miss him and need him ”

“ For the berries possessed secret virtues known only to a man of the Dedannans, and learned from him by Sheela the Scribe, who put him under gesa not to reveal the charm to any one else. Whosoever ate of the honey-sweet, scarlet-glowing fruit felt a cheerful flow of spirits, as if he had tasted wine or mead, and whosoever ate a sufficient number of them was almost certain to grow younger. These things were written in the Speckled Book of Salemina, but in druidical ink, undecipherable to all eyes but those of the Scribe herself. ”

“ Love is doing the same thing for Francesca; for the smaller feelings merge themselves in the larger ones, as little streams lose themselves in oceans. Whenever we talk quietly together of that strange, new, difficult life that she is going so bravely and so joyously to meet, I know by her expression that Ronald's noble face, a little shy, a little proud, but altogether adoring, serves her for courage and for inspiration, and she feels that his hand is holding hers across the distance, in a clasp that promises strength. ”

“ The young alders and the hawthorn hedges are greening, but it will be a fortnight before we can realise the beauty of that snow-white bloom, with its bitter-sweet fragrance. The cuckoo-flower came this year before instead of after the bird, they tell us, showing that even Nature, in these days of anarchy and misrule, is capable of taking liberties with her own laws. There is a fragrance of freshly turned earth in the air, and the rooks are streaming out from the elms by the little church, and resting for a bit in a group of plume-like yews. ”

“ Truth to say, nature has done more for it than we could have done; and if it is a trifle overgrown and rough and rank, it could hardly be more beautiful. At the very furthest confines of the demesne there is a brook,—large enough, indeed, to be called a river here, where they have no Mississippi to dwarf all other streams and serve as an impossible standard of comparison. Tall trees droop over the calm water, and on its margins grow spearwort, opening its big yellow cups to the sunshine, meadow rue, purple and yellow loosestrife, bog bean, and sweet flag. ”

“ When we glide along the surface of the lakes, on some bright day after a heavy rain; when we look down through the clear water on tiny submerged islets, with their grasses and drowned daisies glancing up at us from the blue; when we moor the boat and climb the hillsides, we are dazzled by the luxuriant beauty of it all. It hardly seems real—it is too green, too perfect, to be believed; and one thinks of some fairy drop-scene, painted by cunning-fingered elves and sprites, who might have a wee folk's way of mixing roses and rainbows, dew-drenched greens and sun-warmed yellows ”

“ The last few days of warmth and sunshine have inspired the birds, and as Francesca and I sit at our windows breathing in the sweetness and freshness of the morning, there is a concert of thrushes and blackbirds in the shrubberies. The little birds furnish the chorus or the undertone of song, the hedge-sparrows, redbreasts, and chaffinches, but the meistersingers 'call the tune,' and lead the feathered orchestra with clear and certain notes. It is a golden time for the minstrels, for nest-building is finished, and the feeding of the younglings a good time yet in the future. ”

“ The air is still; the mountains in the far distance are clear purple; everything is fresh washed and purified for the new day. Francesca and I leave the house sleeping, and make our way to the bogs. We love to sit under a blossoming sloe-bush and see the silver pools glistening here and there in the turf cuttings, and watch the transparent vapour rising from the red-brown of the purple-shadowed bog fields. Dinnis Rooney, half awake, leisurely, silent, is moving among the stacks with his creel. ”

“ Himself (God bless him!) shall never have that patient look, if I can help it; but how it will appeal to Salemina! There are women who are born to be petted and served, and there are those who seem born to serve others. Salemina's first idea is always to make tangled things smooth (like little Broona's curly hair) ; to bring sweet and discreet order out of chaos; to prune and graft and water and weed and tend things, until they blossom for very shame under her healing touch. ”

“ We were wise in our generation, and asked for nothing but bacon, eggs, and tea; and after a smoky bath and a change of raiment we seated at our repast in the coffee-room, feeling wonderfully fresh and cheerful. By looking directly at each other most of the time, and making experimental journeys from plate to mouth, thus barring out any intimate knowledge of the tablecloth and the waiter's linen, we managed to make a breakfast. Francesca is enough to give any one a good appetite. ”

“ Ronald and Himself were walking toward us; Salemina and Dr. Gerald were sitting together in one of the front pews. I beckoned to my husband.
“Will you and Ronald go quietly out one of the side doors,” I asked, “take your own car, and go back to the hotel, allowing us to follow you a little later?”
It takes more than one year of marriage for even the cleverest Benedict to uproot those weeds of stupidity, denseness, and non-comprehension that seem to grow so riotously in the mental garden of the bachelor; so, said Himself, “We came all together; why shouldn't we go home all together?” ”

“ Lonely, when the vision of the beloved is so poignantly real in absence that his bodily presence adds only a final touch to joy! Dull, or sad, when in these soft days of spring and early summer I have harboured a new feeling of companionship and oneness with Nature, a fresh joy in all her bounteous resource and plenitude of life, a renewed sense of kinship with her mysterious awakenings! ”

“ The waste of all God's gifts; the incredible poverty; the miserable huts, often without window or chimney; the sad-eyed women, sometimes nothing but 'skins, bones, and grief'; the wild, beautiful children, springing up like startled deer from behind piles of rocks or growths of underbrush; the stony little bits of earth which the peasants cling to with such passion, while good grasslands lie unused, yet seem for ever out of reach,—all this makes one dream, and wonder, and speculate, and hope against hope that the worst is over and a better day dawning. ”

“ Gladstone's misunderstanding of Irish questions,—a misunderstanding, he said, so colossal, so temperamental, and so all-embracing, that it amounted to genius. I was so anxious to return to Salemina that I wished I had ordered the car at ten thirty instead of eleven; but I made up my mind, as we ladies went to the drawing-room for coffee, that I would seize the first favourable opportunity to explore the secret chambers of Dr. La Touche's being. I love to rummage in out-of-the-way corners of people's brains and hearts if they will let me. ”