I hope you will take the earliest opportunity of writing that you can, and be particular as regards Margaret, for she requires consolation.' He died exactly a week after writing this letter, but my mother was to live for another forty-four years.

And joys of a kind never shared in by him were to come to her so abundantly, so long drawn out that, strange as it would have seemed to him to know it, her fuller life had scarce yet begun.

And with the joys were to come their sweet, frightened comrades pain and grief; again she was to be touched to the quick, again and again to be so ill that 'she is in life, we can say no more,' but still she had attendants very 'forward' to help her, some of them unborn in her father's time.
She told me everything, and so my memories of our little red town are coloured by her memories.

I knew it as it had been for generations, and suddenly I saw it change, and the transformation could not fail to strike a boy, for these first years are the most impressionable (nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much); they are also the most vivid years when we look back, and more vivid the farther we have to look, until, at the end, what lies between bends like a hoop, and the extremes meet.

But though the new town is to me a glass through which I look at the old, the people I see passing up and down these wynds, sitting, nightcapped, on their barrow-shafts, hobbling in their blacks to church on Sunday, are less those I saw in my childhood than their fathers and mothers who did these things in the same way when my mother was young.