“
[
24]
much of the world's beauty and value may be shut out from the eyes of a human being, by even a careful education!
This loss cannot easily be remedied in later years.
I myself had reached mature life before I experienced the deep and calm enjoyments of country life.
The long, still summer days, the open, fragrant fields, the shy wild blossoms, the song of birds; these won me at last to delight in them — at first they seemed to me only a void.
It was a new gospel that the meadows taught me, and my own little children were its interpreters.
I know now some country craft, and could even trim fruit trees and weed garden beds.
But I have always regretted in this respect the lost time of youth.
When I made acquaintance with Nature, I was too old to learn the skill of gardening.
Year after year in the savage island of
Newport, where labor is hard to hire, I have passed summers ungladdened by so much as a hollyhock, and the garden I at last managed to secure owes nothing to my skill or knowledge.”
The truth is, people were afraid of the open air in those days.
Julia and her sisters sometimes went for a drive in pleasant weather, dressed in blue pelisses and yellow satin bonnets to match the chariot; they rarely went out on foot; when they did, it was in cambric dresses and kid slippers; the result was apt to be a cold or a sore throat, proving conclusively to the minds of their elders how much better off they were within doors.
Julia's nursery recollections were chiefly of No. 16 Bond Street. Here the little Wards lived a happy but somewhat sober life, under the watchful care of their
