Muir, Helen Excerpt, Page 4

From Helen to LMW - 2/26/43 Dances - Continued to Berkeley alone. Neither Papa nor Mama approved of us going to the public dances in Martinez. We never went to any evening entertainment there. Papa often danced a jig for us when we were little girls and he showed us how the Highland Fling was danced tho I don\u27t imagine he showed us all its steps, just the general idea. He also imitated the Highlanders\u27 bagpipes, very well too, as I realized many years later when I heard the real ones. WALKS IN THE HILLS: The walks in the hills are among my happiest childhood memories, . . . he often laughed heartily, but never loudly. . . Our walks were always happy and often gay times. In the spring we had the wild flowers to enjoy and study too, for lessons in botony were part of the walks. We often chose our walks according to the plants we wanted to see, for some hillsides were blue with brodeas or larkspur, some rocky slope was gay with red Indian paint brushes, some open glade was knee-deep in ( buttercups. And we knew cool, damp dells under the laurels where j/ maidenhair fern grew beside a little spring. We loved them all. And the buckeye balls that were just starting a baby tree, two or three inches high, from their brown shells, acorns that had lain in the damp leaf mold til life was sitrring within them - what interesting lessons these were for growing children.https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmr-all/1198/thumbnail.jp