I Did Not Make It Up

Dreamthorp, a remembrance of his little village in Scotland, was written by Alexander Smith in the same year Abraham Lincoln penned the Gettyburg Address. Here is the passage from which Bradbury lifted the quotation:

“From the little height where I am now sitting, I see it beneath me. Nothing could be more peaceful. The wind and the birds fly over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a white gable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-tree beyond, and disappears. I see figures in the street, but hear them not. The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one hour. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. I make a frame of my fingers, and look at my picture. On the walls of the next Academy’s Exhibition will hang nothing half so beautiful!”

“My village is, I think, a special favourite of summer’s. Every window-sill in it she touches with colour and fragrance; everywhere she wakens the drowsy murmurs of the hives; every place she scents with apple-blossom. Traces of her hand are to be seen on the weir beside the ruined mill; and even the canal, along which the barges come and go, has a great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured face. Never was velvet on a monarch’s robe so gorgeous as the green mosses that beruff* the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on them and goes.”

* This is an abbreviant, I think, of beruffle.

Until next week,

Aroo to you.

Indiana Beagle