Besides reading the Bible with the family every evening, I read a chapter from it each morning before rising.
My Bible was a very small one, with exceedingly fine print. Pressed between its pages were some flowers that I was very fond of; especially was I of the spray of pink larkspur, which had the power of bringing very distinctly before my mind's eye the stubble fields (gleux) of the Island of Oleron where I had gathered it.
I do not know exactly how to explain the word gleux, but it means the stubble which remains3 after the grain is harvested, and those fields of short pale yellow stalks that the autumn sun dries and turns a bright golden. In these fields upon the Island, overrun by chirping4 grasshoppers5, late corn-flowers and white and pink larkspur come up, grow very high, and blossom.
And upon winter mornings, before beginning to read, I always looked at the spray of flowers which still retained its delicate color, and there appeared to me a vision of the Island, and I longed for the summer time and for the warm and sunny fields of Oleron.
“And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth!
“And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.”
When I read my Bible for myself, having then my choice of passages, I either selected that grand portion of Genesis wherein the light is separated from the darkness, or the visions and the marvels
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