AND WILD FLOWERS 77 



birds' nests some with eggs, others with 

 fledgelings all these disappeared on that 

 Sunday. No beauty remains inviolate for 

 long. 



I walked slowly to the tram terminus, 

 where the crowded cars waited to bear the 

 many people back to London, thinking 

 that soon the woods would be down, and 

 houses with their inevitable laurel and 

 rhododendron bushes crowd together in 

 regular patches; the sooner, perhaps, the 

 better. Memory of former days was only 

 too poignantly present. 



In the cars sat the women and the men, 

 each one clasping a flower or a fragment of 

 blossom of hawthorn, apple, or chestnut 

 tree; the little children wriggled and 

 chattered, holding in their arms great 

 bunches of bluebells with their sappy stalks 

 gleaming white where the sun had not stained 

 them; boys with purple-dusty grass bennets 

 and girls with lilac-coloured cuckoo flowers 

 and drooping buttercups. A phantom 



