130 NATURE NEAR LONDON 



moment, and looked at steadily it goes. Among the 

 grass, the hawkweeds, one or two dandelions, and a 

 stray buttercup, all yellow, favour the illusion. By 

 the bushes there is a double row of pale buff bryony 

 leaves; these, too, help to increase the sense of a 

 secondary colour. 



The atmosphere holds the beams, and abstracts from 

 them their white brilliance. They come slower with a 

 drowsy light, which casts a less denned shadow of the 

 still oaks. The yellow and brown leaves in the oaks, in 

 the elms, and the beeches, in their turn affect the rays, 

 and retouch them with their own hue. An immaterial 

 mist across the fields looks like a cloud of light hovering 

 on the stubble : the light itself made visible. 



The tawniness is indistinct, it haunts the sunshine, and 

 is not to be fixed, any more than you can say where 

 it begins and ends in the complexion of a brunette. 

 Almost too large for their cups, the acorns have a shade 

 of the same hue now before they become brown. As it 

 withers, the many-pointed leaf of the white bryony and 

 the bine as it shrivels, in like manner, do their part. 

 The white thistle-down, which stays on the bursting 

 thistles because there is no wind to waft it away, reflects 

 it; the white is pushed aside by the colour that the 

 stained sunbeams bring. 



Pale yellow thatch on the wheat-ricks becomes a 

 deeper yellow; broad roofs of old red tiles smoulder 

 under it. What can you call it but tawniness? the 

 earth sunburnt once more at harvest time. Sunburnt 

 and brown for it deepens into brown. Brown part- 

 ridges, and pheasants, at a distance brown, their long 

 necks stretched in front and long tails behind gleaming 

 in the stubble. Brown thrushes just venturing to sing 

 again. Brown clover hayricks ; the bloom on the third 



