A CHILD’S DIARY

Hokitika Guardian, 28 December 1920, Page 1

A CHILD’S DIARY

The reader of “Tho Diary of Opal AVliitely” will not find much of that unconscious humour which made Miss Daisy Ashford’s “Young Visitors” so delightful, but lie will derive much keen enjoyment of another kind. There is a gcod deal of mystery about tile author’s origin. Tho internal evidence of the diary suggests that her parents were French and of generous culture. She lias memories of walks in .which her mother told her to listen “to what the flowers and the trees and the birds were saying,” and Bade her write down what she had heard. Her parents died when she was five years old, and not long afterwards she was adopted by the wife of an Oregon lumberman, who appears to have named her after her own dead daughter. This diary was written—or rather, printed, laboriously in capitals on stray scraps (if paper—by ber between the age of six and seven, and reveals a mind extraordinarily sensitive to beauty in every shape and form. “The special quality of the hook” observes Viscount Grey of Fallodon, in an introduction, “is its vivid interest in, and feeling for, the beauty of the world and the life in it. In

everything, from the joy light in human eyes to ‘the touch of the velvety fingers of the shadows,’ the child secs beauty and finds happiness.” Everything from the domestic animals to the trees and hushes in the woods has a name —usually that of some personage in history or literature. Almost every day has some association—it is the ‘borning-day’ or the ‘going-away day’ of someone great. Everything is animate and articulate; there is no object but has a spirit and speech of its own. “As I did go,” writes this little pantheist, “I did have hearings of nniiy voices, they were the voices of earth

glad for the spring. They did say what thej r had to say in the growing grass and in the loaves growing out from tho tips of branches. The birds did have knowing and say what the grasses and leaves did say of the gladness of living. I, too, did feel glad from my toes to my curls.” In another passage she describes how “Thoughts come from heaven and live among the flowers and the ferns, and often I find them in the trees.” On one occasion she “did have meditations about what things the eyes of potatoes do see there in the ground on another she was so impressed with the plump and comfortable appearance of potatoes

lying in piles that she gave them lectures on geology and the habits of caterpillars. If an older child had

written in this strain we might suspect it of a desire to play to the gallery, hut the sincerity and spontaneity of the "Diary” are quite unmistakable. Everything is. personified often with quaint effect. Thus, the adult would say that the baby had the colic, bqt in the diary we rend that “the colic had the baby to-day, and”—hear the tragic sequel—“there was no castoria for the pains. There was none because yesterday Pearl and I climbed upon a cliair and then upon the dresser and drank up the new bottle of castoria j but the bottle bad an ache in it, and we swallowed the ache with ijhe castoria. That gave us queer feels. Pearl lay down on the bed. I did rub her head, but she said it wasn’t her head that hurt.” This, perhaps, is one of the incidents which according to Viscount Grey, “would be intolerably poignant, but for the fact that they seem to have affected the spirits of the child so little.”