Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

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Charles Kingsley. Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

PREFACE

CHAPTER I—THE GLEN

CHAPTER II—EARTHQUAKES

CHAPTER III—VOLCANOS

CHAPTER IV—THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF A GRAIN OF SOIL

CHAPTER V—THE ICE-PLOUGH

CHAPTER VI—THE TRUE FAIRY TALE

CHAPTER VII—THE CHALK-CARTS

CHAPTER VIII—MADAM HOW’S TWO GRANDSONS

CHAPTER IX—THE CORAL-REEF

CHAPTER X—FIELD AND WILD

CHAPTER XI—THE WORLD’S END

CHAPTER XII—HOMEWARD BOUND

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You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge Flat this sad November day?  Well, I do not deny that the moor looks somewhat dreary, though dull it need never be.  Though the fog is clinging to the fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till you cannot see as far as Minley Corner, hardly as far as Bramshill woods—and all the Berkshire hills are as invisible as if it was a dark midnight—yet there is plenty to be seen here at our very feet.  Though there is nothing left for you to pick, and all the flowers are dead and brown, except here and there a poor half-withered scrap of bottle-heath, and nothing left for you to catch either, for the butterflies and insects are all dead too, except one poor old Daddy-long-legs, who sits upon that piece of turf, boring a hole with her tail to lay her eggs in, before the frost catches her and ends her like the rest: though all things, I say, seem dead, yet there is plenty of life around you, at your feet, I may almost say in the very stones on which you tread.  And though the place itself be dreary enough, a sheet of flat heather and a little glen in it, with banks of dead fern, and a brown bog between them, and a few fir-trees struggling up—yet, if you only have eyes to see it, that little bit of glen is beautiful and wonderful,—so beautiful and so wonderful and so cunningly devised, that it took thousands of years to make it; and it is not, I believe, half finished yet.

How do I know all that?  Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who lives up here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if people have but eyes to see her.  What is her name?  I cannot tell.  The best name that I can give her (and I think it must be something like her real name, because she will always answer if you call her by it patiently and reverently) is Madam How.  She will come in good time, if she is called, even by a little child.  And she will let us see her at her work, and, what is more, teach us to copy her.  But there is another fairy here likewise, whom we can hardly hope to see.  Very thankful should we be if she lifted even the smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for a moment if it were but her finger tip—so beautiful is she, and yet so awful too.  But that sight, I believe, would not make us proud, as if we had had some great privilege.  No, my dear child: it would make us feel smaller, and meaner, and more stupid and more ignorant than we had ever felt in our lives before; at the same time it would make us wiser than ever we were in our lives before—that one glimpse of the great glory of her whom we call Lady Why.

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But I must tell you I think there was a time when this glen was of a very different shape from what it is now; and I dare say, according to your notions, of a much prettier shape.  It was once just like one of those Chines which we used to see at Bournemouth.  You recollect them?  How there was a narrow gap in the cliff of striped sands and gravels; and out of the mouth of that gap, only a few feet across, there poured down a great slope of mud and sand the shape of half a bun, some wet and some dry, up which we used to scramble and get into the Chine, and call the Chine what it was in the truest sense, Fairyland.  You recollect how it was all eaten out into mountain ranges, pinnacles, steep cliffs of white, and yellow, and pink, standing up against the clear blue sky; till we agreed that, putting aside the difference of size, they were as beautiful and grand as any Alps we had ever seen in pictures.  And how we saw (for there could be no mistake about it there) that the Chine was being hollowed out by the springs which broke out high up the cliff, and by the rain which wore the sand into furrowed pinnacles and peaks.  You recollect the beautiful place, and how, when we looked back down it we saw between the miniature mountain walls the bright blue sea, and heard it murmur on the sands outside.  So I verily believe we might have done, if we had stood somewhere at the bottom of this glen thousands of years ago.  We should have seen the sea in front of us; or rather, an arm of the sea; for Finchampstead ridges opposite, instead of being covered with farms, and woodlands, and purple heath above, would have been steep cliffs of sand and clay, just like those you see at Bournemouth now; and—what would have spoilt somewhat the beauty of the sight—along the shores there would have floated, at least in winter, great blocks and floes of ice, such as you might have seen in the tideway at King’s Lynn the winter before last, growling and crashing, grubbing and ploughing the sand, and the gravel, and the mud, and sweeping them away into seas towards the North, which are now all fruitful land.  That may seem to you like a dream: yet it is true; and some day, when we have another talk with Madam How, I will show even a child like you that it was true.

But what could change a beautiful Chine like that at Bournemouth into a wide sloping glen like this of Bracknell’s Bottom, with a wood like Coombs’, many acres large, in the middle of it?  Well now, think.  It is a capital plan for finding out Madam How’s secrets, to see what she might do in one place, and explain by it what she has done in another.  Suppose now, Madam How had orders to lift up the whole coast of Bournemouth only twenty or even ten feet higher out of the sea than it is now.  She could do that easily enough, for she has been doing so on the coast of South America for ages; she has been doing so this very summer in what hasty people would call a hasty, and violent, and ruthless way; though I shall not say so, for I believe that Lady Why knows best.  She is doing so now steadily on the west coast of Norway, which is rising quietly—all that vast range of mountain wall and iron-bound cliff—at the rate of some four feet in a hundred years, without making the least noise or confusion, or even causing an extra ripple on the sea; so light and gentle, when she will, can Madam How’s strong finger be.

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