1
Bede's charity
by Hesba Stretton
Chapter 1
BEADE'S FARM
It seems a strange thing for me to tell the history of my life, for I am a person of no consequence at all, a poor farmer's daughter, and an unlearned woman, having only learnt one lesson well, and even that not well enough - that all things do most surely work together for good for any one, however poor and unlearned, who loves God.
The old house at home was fully one hundred and seventy miles from London, hard upon the borders of Wales, and there never was a waft of city smoke in the sweet fresh air. Even to go down to the nearest town, which was three miles away, you had to go through green woods and coppices of dark fir trees before you came in sight and sound of streets. My father, and his father, and his grandfather, had all lived on the same little farm---a farm of about two hundred acres of rather barren land, but with a right to keep sheep on the common, which stretched away to the foot of a solitary hill, rising straight up from the level land; almost a mountain, people said, and so, solitary and alone that it looked higher than it was, maybe. Sometimes when the clouds rested on the brow of the hill of a morning, quite hiding it from our eyes, I used to fancy that perhaps the angels were there behind the white veil of mist; or it made me think of Abraham going up the mount to offer up his son to God; and I wondered if he and his son and the altar were not all hidden from the sight of the young men who were staying down in the plain afar off. When the clouds hung there hour after hour thick and bleak, gathering all