[Milly and Olly by Mrs. Humphry Ward]@TWC D-Link bookMilly and Olly CHAPTER IX 12/25
By this time the children knew the names of most of the mountains around, and of all the lakes. They went through them now like a lesson with their father; and even Olly remembered a great many, and could chatter about Helvellyn, and Fairfield, and Langdale Pikes, as if he had trudged to the top of them all himself. Then came the getting down again.
Father and Milly and Olly hand-in-hand, racing over the short fine grass, startling the little black-faced sheep, and racing down the steep bits, where Milly and Olly generally tumbled over in some sort of a heap at the bottom.
As for the flowers they gathered, there were so many I have no time to tell you about them--wood-flowers and bog-flowers and grass-flowers, and ferns of all sizes to mix with them, from the great Osmunda, which grew along the Ravensnest Beck, down to the tiny little parsley fern.
It was all delightful--the sights and the sounds, and the fresh mountain wind that blew them about on the top so that long afterward Milly used to look back to that walk on Brownholme when she was seven years old as one of the merriest times she ever spent. Dinner was very welcome after all this scrambling; and after dinner came a quiet time in the garden, when father read aloud to mother and Aunt Emma, and the children kept still and listened to as much as they could understand, at least until they went to sleep, which they both did lying on a rug at Aunt Emma's feet.
Milly couldn't understand how this had happened at all, when she found herself waking up and rubbing her eyes, but I think it was natural enough after their long walk in the sun and wind. At four o'clock nurse came for them, and when they had been put into clean frocks and pinafores, she took them up to the farm.
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