A JOURNAL KEPT IN THE COUNTRY. 29 



and to reflect how much of all the garden holds 

 was dear to one's grandfather, how very much our 

 grandsons will despise. The true catholic, the man 

 in the mean state, judicious between ancestry and 

 descendants, finds sufficient delight, even in the early 

 essays of the opening year, to compensate many a 

 loss. The winter may have destroyed his favourite 

 pentstemon ; but here are the snowdrops, thicker 

 than ever, under the hazels and the holly hedge. 



ijth. Dull weather, with low clouds and windless 

 air, has for the last week drowned all the landscape 

 in blue-grey haze, but once or twice pierced by shafts 

 of sun which touched out wonderful contrasts of 

 willow-rows or tufted hill flushing against the purple 

 distance. Then one night a stormy sunset, flaming 

 in the west and firing all the ring of the horizon, 

 foretold change. Under the tossed-up waves of 

 crimson, scudded little ragged vapours already in the 

 night, grey and dismal. It signified both wet and 

 wind ; the more certainly as Bish the gardener 

 thought we wouldn't get a change before the next 

 quarter of the moon ; for Bish's predictions are 

 frequently right, when inverted. 



One might naturally expect country folk in the 

 Weald to grow up to some judgment of the weather. 

 Observations through plate-glass windows, and by 



