Part 3

The leaves are enlarging, and the sap rising, and the hard trunks of the trees swelling with its flow; the grass blades pushing upwards; the seeds completing their shape; the tinted petals uncurling. Dreamily listening, leaning on the gate, all these are audible to the inner senses, while the ear follows the midsummer hum, now sinking, now sonorously increasing over the oaks. An effulgence fills the southern boughs, which the eye cannot sustain, but which it knows is there.

The sun at its meridian pours forth his light, forgetting, in all the inspiration of his strength and glory, that without an altar-screen of green his love must scorch. Joy in life; joy in life. The ears listen, and want more: the eyes are gratified with gazing, and desire yet further; the nostrils are filled with the sweet odours of flower and sap. The touch, too, has its pleasures, dallying with leaf and flower. Can you not almost grasp the odour-laden air and hold it in the hollow of the hand?

Leaving the spot at last, and turning again into the lane, the shadows dance upon the white dust under the feet, irregularly circular spots of light surrounded with umbra shift with the shifting branches. By the wayside lie rings of dandelion stalks carelessly cast down by the child who made them, and tufts of delicate grasses gathered for their beauty but now sprinkled with dust. Wisps of hay hang from the lower boughs of the oaks where they brushed against the passing load.

After a time, when the corn is ripening, the herb betony flowers on the mounds under the oaks. Following the lane down the hill and across the small furze common at the bottom, the marks of traffic fade away, the dust ceases, and is succeeded by sward. The hedgerows on either side are here higher than ever, and are thickly fringed with bramble bushes, which sometimes encroach on the waggon ruts in the middle, and are covered with flowers, and red, and green, and ripe blackberries together.

Green rushes line the way, and green dragon flies dart above them. Thistledown is pouting forth from the swollen tops of thistles crowded with seed. In a gateway the turf has been worn away by waggon wheels and the hoofs of cart horses, and the dry heat has pulverised the crumbling ruts. Three hen pheasants and a covey of partridges that have been dusting themselves here move away without much haste at the approach of footsteps--the pheasants into the thickets, and the partridges through the gateway. The shallow holes in which they were sitting can be traced on the dust, and there are a few small feathers lying about.

A barley field is within the gate; the mowers have just begun to cut it on the opposite side. Next to it is a wheat field; the wheat has been cut and stands in shocks. From the stubble by the nearest shock two turtle doves rise, alarmed, and swiftly fly towards a wood which bounds the field. This wood, indeed, upon looking again, clearly bounds not this field only, but the second and the third, and so far as the eye can see over the low hedges of the corn, the trees continue. The green lane as it enters the wood, becomes wilder and rougher at every step, widening, too, considerably.

In the centre the wheels of timber carriages, heavily laden with trunks of trees which were dragged through by straining teams in the rainy days of spring, have left vast ruts, showing that they must have sunk to the axle in the soft clay. These then filled with water, and on the water duck-weed grew, and aquatic grasses at the sides. Summer heats have evaporated the water, leaving the weeds and grasses prone upon the still moist earth.

Rushes have sprung up and mark the line of the ruts, and willow stoles, bramble bushes, and thorns growing at the side, make, as it were, a third hedge in the middle of the lane. The best path is by the wood itself, but even there occasional leaps are necessary over pools of dark water full of vegetation. These alternate with places where the ground, being higher, yawns with wide cracks crumbling at the edge, the heat causing the clay to split and open. In winter it must be an impassable quagmire; now it is dry and arid.

Rising out of this low-lying spot the lane again becomes green and pleasant, and is crossed by another. At the meeting of these four ways some boughs hang over a green bank where I have often rested. In front the lane is barred by a gate, but beyond the gate it still continues its straight course into the wood. To the left the track, crossing at right angles, also proceeds into the wood, but it is so overhung with trees and blocked by bushes that its course after the first hundred yards or so cannot be traced.

To the right the track--a little wider and clearer of bushes--extends through wood, and as it is straight and rises up a gentle slope, the eye can travel along it half a mile. There is nothing but wood around. This track to the right appears the most used, and has some ruts in the centre. The sward each side is concealed by endless thistles, on the point of sending forth clouds of thistledown, and to which presently the goldfinches will be attracted.

Occasionally a movement among the thistles betrays the presence of a rabbit; only occasionally, for though the banks are drilled with buries, the lane is too hot for them at midday. Particles of rabbits' fur lie on the ground, and their runs are visible in every direction. But there are no birds. A solitary robin, indeed, perches on an ash branch opposite, and regards me thoughtfully. It is impossible to go anywhere in the open air without a robin; they are the very spies of the wood. But there are no thrushes, no blackbirds, finches, nor even sparrows.

In August it is true most birds cease to sing, but sitting thus partially hidden and quiet, if there were any about something would be heard of them. There would be a rustling, a thrush would fly across the lane, a blackbird would appear by the gateway yonder in the shadow which he loves, a finch would settle in the oaks. None of these incidents occur; none of the lesser signs of life in the foliage, the tremulous spray, the tap of a bill cleaned by striking first one side and then the other against a bough, the rustle of a wing--nothing.

There are woods, woods, woods; but no birds. Yonder a drive goes straight into the ashpoles, it is green above and green below, but a long watch will reveal nothing living. The dry mounds must be full of rabbits, there must be pheasants somewhere; but nothing visible. Once only a whistling sound in the air directs the glance upwards, it is a wood-pigeon flying at full speed. There are no bees, for there are no flowers. There are no butterflies. The black flies are not numerous, and rarely require a fanning from the ash spray carried to drive them off.

Two large dragon-flies rush up and down, and cross the lane, and rising suddenly almost to the tops of the oaks swoop down again in bold sweeping curves. The broad, deep ditch between the lane and the mound of the wood is dry, but there are no short rustling sounds of mice.

The only sound is the continuous singing of the grasshoppers, and the peculiar snapping noise they make as they spring, leaping along the sward. The fierce sun of the ripe wheat pours down a fiery glow scarcely to be borne except under the boughs; the hazel leaves already have lost their green, the tips of the rushes are shrivelling, the grass becoming brown; it is a scorched and parched desert of wood.

The finches have gone forth in troops to the stubble where the wheat has been cut, and where they can revel on the seeds of the weeds now ripe. Thrushes and blackbirds have gone to the streams, to splash and bathe, and to the mown meadows, where in the short aftermath they can find their food. There they will look out on the shady side of the hedge as the sun declines, six or eight perhaps of them along the same hedge, but all in the shadow, where the dew forms first as the evening falls, where the grass feels cool and moist, while still on the sunny side it is warm and dry.

The bees are busy on the heaths and along the hilltops, where there are still flowers and honey, and the butterflies are with them. So the woods are silent, still, and deserted, save by a stray rabbit among the thistles, and the grasshoppers ceaselessly leaping in the grass.

Returning presently to the gateway just outside the wood, where upon first coming the pheasants and partridges were dusting themselves, a waggon is now passing among the corn and is being laden with the sheaves. But afar off, across the broad field and under the wood, it seems somehow only a part of the silence and the solitude. The men with it move about the stubble, calmly toiling; the horses, having drawn it a little way, become motionless, reposing as they stand, every line of their large limbs expressing delight in physical ease and idleness.

Perhaps the heat has made the men silent, for scarcely a word is spoken; if it were, in the stillness it must be heard, though they are at some distance. The wheels, well greased for the heavy harvest work, do not creak. Save an occasional monosyllable, as the horses are ordered on, or to stop, and a faint rustling of straw, there is no sound. It may be the flood of brilliant light, or the mirage of the heat, but in some way the waggon and its rising load, the men and the horses, have an unreality of appearance.

The yellow wheat and stubble, the dull yellow of the waggon, toned down by years of weather, the green woods near at hand, darkening in the distance and slowly changing to blue, the cloudless sky, the heat-suffused atmosphere, in which things seem to float rather than to grow or stand, the shadowless field, all are there, and yet are not there, but far away and vision-like. The waggon, at last laden, travels away, and seems rather to disappear of itself than to be hidden by the trees. It is an effort to awake and move from the spot.

FOOTPATHS

"Always get over a stile," is the one rule that should ever be borne in mind by those who wish to see the land as it really is--that is to say, never omit to explore a footpath, for never was there a footpath yet which did not pass something of interest.

In the meadows, everything comes pressing lovingly up to the path. The small-leaved clover can scarce be driven back by frequent footsteps from endeavouring to cover the bare earth of the centre. Tall buttercups, round whose stalks the cattle have carefully grazed, stand in ranks; strong ox-eye daisies, with broad white disks and torn leaves, form with the grass the tricolour of the pasture--white, green, and gold.

When the path enters the mowing grass, ripe for the scythe, the simplicity of these cardinal hues is lost in the multitude of shades and the addition of other colours. The surface of mowing grass is indeed made up of so many tints that at the first glance it is confusing; and hence, perhaps, it is that hardly ever has an artist succeeded in getting the effect upon canvas. Of the million blades of grass no two are of the same shade.

Pluck a handful and spread them out side by side and this is at once evident. Nor is any single blade the same shade all the way up. There may be a faint yellow towards the root, a full green about the middle, at the tip perhaps the hot sun has scorched it, and there is a trace of brown. The older grass, which comes up earliest, is distinctly different in tint from that which has but just reached its greatest height, and in which the sap has not yet stood still.

Under all there is the new grass, short, sweet, and verdant, springing up fresh between the old, and giving a tone to the rest as you look down into the bunches. Some blades are nearly grey, some the palest green, and among them others, torn from the roots perhaps by rooks searching for grubs, are quite white. The very track of a rook through the grass leaves a different shade each side, as the blades are bent or trampled down.

The stalks of the bennets vary, some green, some yellowish, some brown, some approaching whiteness, according to age and the condition of the sap. Their tops, too, are never the same, whether the pollen clings to the surface or whether it has gone. Here the green is almost lost in red, or quite; here the grass has a soft, velvety look; yonder it is hard and wiry, and again graceful and drooping. Here there are bunches so rankly verdant that no flower is visible and no other tint but dark green; here it is thin and short, and the flowers, and almost the turf itself, can be seen; then there is an array of bennets (stalks which bear the grass-seed) with scarcely any grass proper.

Every variety of grass--and they are many--has its own colour, and every blade of every variety has its individual variations of that colour. The rain falls, and there is a darker tint at large upon the field, fresh but darker; the sun shines and at first the hue is lighter, but presently if the heat last a brown comes. The wind blows, and immediately as the waves of grass roll across the meadow a paler tint follows it.