Explore "Olive" by Dinah Mulock on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Looking back on a calm and uneventful childhood -- and by childhood we mean the seven years between the babyhood of five and the dignity of "teens," -- it always seems like a cloudy landscape, with a few points of view here and there, which stand out clearly from the rest. Therein the fields are larger and the sky brighter than any we now behold. Persons, places, and events assume a mystery and importance. We never think of them, or hear them named afterwards, but there clings to them something of the strange glamour of the time when "we saw men as trees walking."
Olive's childhood was passed in the place mentioned by her father. Merivale! Oldchurch! In her future life the words, whenever heard, always sounded like an echo of that dreamy time, whose sole epochs are birthdays, Christmas-days, the first snowdrop found in the garden, the first daisy in the field. Such formed the only chronicle of Olive's childhood.