ABSTRACT
[…] I had plenty of leisure but it was the leisure of solitude for my sundays were demanded to be spent in the fields at horse or cow tending my whole summer was one days employment as it were in the fields I grew so much into the quiet love of nature’s perserves that I was never easy but when I was in the fields passing my sabbaths and leisure with the shepherds & herdboys as fancys prompted sometimes playing at marbles on the smooth-beaten sheeptracks or leapfrog among the thymy molehills sometimes running among the corn to get the red & blue flowers for cockades to play at soldiers or running into the woods to hunt strawberries or stealing peas in churchtime when the owners were safe to boil at the gypseys fire who went half-shares at our stolen luxury we heard the bells chime but the fields was our church & we seemd to feel a religious poetry in our haunts on the sabbath while some old shepherd sat on a molehill reading aloud some favourite chapter from an old fragment of a Bible which he carried in his pocket for the day a family relic which possesd on its covers & title pages in rude scrawls genealogys of the third & fourth Generations when aunts mothers & grandmothers dyd when cousins &c were married & brothers & sisters born occupying all the blank leaves in the book & the title pages which leaves were preservd with a sacred veneration tho half the contents had been sufferd to drop out & be lost
