128 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



one in an instant, and take it down as you would a book 

 from a shelf. The millions of coloured etchings that 

 have fixed tliemselves there in the course of those years 

 are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet 

 they cannot occupy the space of a pin's point They 

 have neither length, breadth, nor thickness, none of the 

 qualifications of mathematical substance, and yet they 

 must in some way be a species of matter. The fact in- 

 dicates the possibility of still more subtle existences. 

 Now I wish I could put before you a coloured, living, 

 moving picture, like that of the camera obscura, of some 

 other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were painted 

 on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin 

 of green downs. They were large enough to have the 

 charm of vague, indefinite extension, and yet all could 

 be distinctly seen. Large squares of green corn that was 

 absorbing its yellow from the sunlight ; chess squares, 

 irregularly placed, of brown furrows ; others of rich 

 blood-red trifolium ; others of scarlet sainfoin and blue 

 lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies here and there. Not 

 all of these, of course, at once, but they followed so 

 quickly in the summer days that they seemed to be one 

 and the same pictures, and had you painted them al- 

 together on the same canvas, together with ripe wheat, 

 they would not have seemed out of place. Never was 

 such brilliant colour ; it was chalk there, and on chalk 

 the colours are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the 

 yellow mustard and charlock a keener yellow ; the air, 

 too, is pellucid. Waggons going along the tracks ; men 

 and women hoeing ; ricks of last year still among 

 clumps of trees, where the chimneys and gables of farm- 

 houses are partly visible ; red-tiled barns away yonder ; 

 a shepherd moving his hurdles ; away again the black 

 funnel of an idle engine, and the fly-wheel above haw- 



