io Idylls of the Field. 



snake until the sun shall rouse them from their winter 

 sleep. The rushes still are green, but it is a cold and 

 sullen tint. 



There is a look of winter everywhere. The little 

 rivers that wander idly through the meadows, swollen 

 with long weeks of rain, have risen over their banks, 

 and have changed the lower levels into wide lagoons. 

 Lines of pollard willows, whose slender branches 

 redden in the sinking sun, stand far out in the flood, 

 and mark the course of unseen water-ways. Tops of 

 hedges show here and there ; solitary houses are 

 islanded by the far-reaching water. So altered is the 

 face of the country that one might almost fancy the 

 flying years to have retraced their steps, and that this 

 was once again the mere across whose moonlit waters 

 the sad-eyed queens bore in their dusky barge the 

 fallen hero to his rest. 



Over all the land linger the memories of a bygone 

 time. On the hills that fringe the wide expanse there 

 is a picture-writing, plain to read, in which is written 

 the story of the past. Every knoll that lifts its head 

 above the moor, in those old days a point of vantage 

 and a safe retreat, is seamed with ancient earthworks 

 and crowned with barrows of the dead. 



Under the briars and bracken of the copses that 

 nestle in the hills are ruins of the Roman villas that 

 once, among rich belts of vines and cornland, looked 

 seaward from these sunny slopes. No step of man 

 sounds now upon their ruined pavements. The timid 



