Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

There is nothing so dumb as a tree in full leaf.

So true.

and gradually his panic turned into a sort of lethargic nightmare of fatalism, which seemed to free him from the necessity of taking action. It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.

he felt awkward and tongue-tied, and was too depressed to have recourse to the somewhat laboured facetiousness with which he was in the habit of greeting the old woman.

is curious what tricks a quarrel, or even a short absence, can play with our mental picture of even our most intimate friends. A few minutes later, as Master Ambrose looked at his old playmate standing at the door, grinning a little sheepishly, he felt as if he had just awakened from a nightmare. This was not “the most criminally negligent Mayor with whom the town of Lud-in-the-Mist had ever been cursed;” still less was it the sinister figure evoked by Endymion Leer. It was just queer old Nat, whom he had known all his life.

every pucker and wrinkle was so familiar that he felt he could have told you every one of the jokes and little worries of which they were the impress.

and now and then one of the bleeding, tortured looking liege-oaks would drop an acorn, with a little flop—just to remind you, as it were, that it was leading its own serene, vegetable life, oblivious to the agony ascribed to it by the fevered fancy of man.

For though they shout it in the market-place, or whisper it in music and poetry, what they say is never the same as what they know, and they are like ghosts charged with a message of tremendous import who can only trail their chains and gibber.

And the real anchor is not hope but faith—even if it be only somebody else’s faith.