Final Word ...

This week's Final Word comes from an author born into a wealthy, if parsimonious, family who sketched sympathetic accounts of 19th-century peasant life:

"And on a wintry day to go walking through the high snowdrifts in search of hares, to breathe in the frosty, sharp-edged air, to crinkle one's eyes unwillingly against the dazzling, finely speckled glitter of the soft snow, to wonder at the green hue of the sky above a reddening forest! . . . And then there are the first spring days, when all around everything gleams and crashes down, and the smell of the warmer earth begins to rise through the heavy steam of melting snow, and skylarks sing trustingly under the sun's oblique rays on patches where the snow has thawed, and, with a gay noise, a gay roaring, the torrents go whirling from ravine to ravineI It is time, however, to finish. Appropriately I have mentioned the spring; in springtime it is easy to say goodbye, in the spring even the happy are enticed to far-off places... Farewell, my reader; I wish you lasting happiness and well-being."

The winner of last week's competition, who correctly identified George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody , is Carolyn Chubb of Plymouth.