Read it through once

This first year in the cottage at Three Mile Cross was spent in a variety of ways by Miss Mitford. In addition to her reading, she was devoting herself to getting the garden into trim and by taking extended walks in the neighbourhood, particularly in exploring that beautiful “Woodcock Lane”—happily still preserved and, possibly, more beautiful than in Miss Mitford’s day—so called, “not after the migratory bird so dear to sportsman and to epicure, but from the name of a family, who, three centuries ago, owned the old manor-house, a part of which still adjoins it.” A delightful picture of this lane, full of the happiest and tenderest memories, is to be found in Miss Mitford’s _Recollections of a Literary Life_. It is too long for quotation here, but for its truth to Nature we can testify, for we have ourselves wandered down its shady length, book in hand, marking and noting the passages as this and that point of view was described, and looking away over the fields as she must have looked—somewhat wistfully, we may believe—to where the smoke from the chimneys at Grazeley Court curled upwards from the trees which so effectually hide the building itself from view. While on these walks, accompanied by Fanchon, the greyhound and Flush, the spaniel, she would take her unspillable ink-bottle and writing materials and, resting awhile beneath the great trees, write of Nature as she saw it, spread there before her. Here, undoubtedly, she wrote many of those pictures of rural life and scenery which, at present, form the most lasting memorial of her life and work.