from Home by Catherine, and this, that you are trampling on, is the Sunshine Oak Avenue!
Hark, there is old Shot barking; he is Catherine’s door bell, and will give warning of visitors on the way. And here is gentle Peggy coming up to be stroked—good old lady, then: nice old white nose!—but not the foal; the foal, see, is suspicious, and holds off. Grey old Peggy is Catherine’s pet pride. She never thought she should live actually to own a horse—let alone drive behind it down a town street, and that in her very own cart! As for the foal, I have not seen its mistress since its birth, but I have no doubt that in her eyes it has at least a dozen characteristics delightfully distinguishing it from every other foal that ever was—as indeed no doubt it has, to any properly seeing eye: like Catherine’s, quick by nature, and kept single by simplicity, and true by sympathy, and keen by love.
Across the water-race where the musk is beginning to spring up, over another pair of hurdles, and here we are, in the roomy, rambling garden—isn’t it a pleasant garden? It is one of the very pleasantest I know. Here, you see, forming the boundary on one side, is the race again, tinkling and twinkling now through shoots of willow, all in their first new tender green, and some beautiful young silver-poplars. The latter make a line of pale-gold all down the race in autumn, but on this October day they are all glancing and laughing, with their blossom-like leaf-buds looking as though they were made out of silver and ivory and moonlight—all in one, and much more beautiful than any, and alive.
