"The year's at the spring, The hillside's dew-pearled; The snail's on the thorn: God's in his heaven, All's right with the world!" PIPPA PASSES. REFERRING BACK. I WANT in this chapter to tell what one of my cl.ildren used to call "a truly story." It came to me one day when I went on a pilgrimage to a huge old factory in the valley of the Washburne, in Yorkshire, in the summer of 1865. I wandered about in a kind of dream. The handful of people left there then were at work among the wheels and spindles, watching me between whiles; for strangers seldom came to that remote place, and I was clearly a stranger; and then, my dress was not what they were used to, especially my American "wide-awake." They were as strange to me as I was to them. There was not a face I knew, not one. And yet this was where I was once as well known to everybody as the child is to its own mother, and where I knew everybody as I knew my own kinsfolk; for it was here that I began my life, and lived it for a space that now seems a lifetime all to itself. And this brings me to my dream. I saw, in one of the great dusty rooms of the factory, a little fellow about eight years old, but big enough to pass for ten, working away from six o'clock in the morning till eight at night, tired sometimes almost to death, and then again not tired at all, rushing out when work was over, and, if it was winter, home to some treasure of a book. There were "Robinson Crusoe," and Bunyan's "Pilgrim," and Goldsmith's Histories of England and of Rome, the first volume of "Sandford and Merton," and one or two more that had something to do with theology; but it must have been meat for strong men, for not one of the brood of children who read the stories, and the Goldsmith that was just as good as stories, would ever touch these others after one or two trials. One of these books that used to lead all boys captive in those good old days, this boy I saw in my dream would hug up close to his bowl of porridge, and eat and read; and then would read after he had done eating, while ever the careful house-mother would allow a candle or a coal. But if it was summer, the books would be neglected, and the rush would be out into the fields and lanes, hunting in the early summer for birds' nests, the tender and holy home canon would never permit to be robbed, and it was always obeyed; or, in the later summer, seeing whether the sloes were turning ever so little from green to black, or whether the crabs (of the wood, not the water) were vulnerable to a boy's sharp and resolute teeth, and when the hazel-nuts would be out of that milky state at which it would be of any use to pluck them, and what was the prospect for hips and haws. The men who profess to know just how we are made, as a watchmaker knows a watch, tell us that once in seven years we get a brand-new body; that the old things pass away in that time, and all things become new. I wonder sometimes if it is not so with our life. Is not that new as well as the frame? There I was that day, a gray-haired minister from a city which had been born and had come to its great place since the small lad began to work in the old mill as I saw him at the end of a vista of four and thirty years. I watched him with a most pathetic interest. "Dear little chap," I said, "you had a hard time; but then it was a good time, too—wasn't it, now? How good bread and butter did taste, to be sure, when half a pound of butter a week had to be divided among eight of us, and the white wheaten bread saved for Sunday! Did ever a flower in this world beside smell as good as the primrose, or prima donna sing like the sky-lark and throstle? Money cannot buy such a Christmas-pudding, or tears or prayers such a Christmas-tide, as the |