Amazing!

Yesterday I wrote about visiting Will, my optician, and in the course of my eye examination he mentioned a writer he very much liked, Mary Russell Mitford who I had never heard of before. “Now we have reached the trees, the beautiful trees,” was a line he quoted from her and as soon as I got home, I looked her up, found out a little about her, and wrote a post. as soon as I had finished that I ordered a copy of her book, Our Village which was originally published in 1824.

How surprised Miss Mitford would have been if she could have foreseen the process that I went through to get her book… but what was even more surprising was that it arrived today, less than twenty-four hours after I ordered it! I’m very much looking forward to reading it and no doubt will write about it later!

A funny little coincidence following that; I was just checking the quote on-line, and found a forum post from someone who had just seen his optician and been asked to read the same sentence, and was wondering where it came from. One answer to his query was that it was a standard reading test from optical suppliers, no it wasn’t, Will chose it himself; somebody suggested it was Keats and quoted a whole poem, which it wasn’t; and finally the person who wrote the query found it himself. How amazed Will the optician would be to think he had caused such interest, and appreciation! Thank you Will!