The Open Air 



Plants everywhere, hiding behind every tree, under 

 the leaves, in the shady places, behind the dry furrows 

 of the field; they are only just behind something, 

 hidden openly. The instant you look for them they 

 multiply a hundredfold ; if you sit on the beach and 

 begin to count the pebbles by you, their number 

 instantly increases to infinity by virtue of that 

 conscious act. 



The bird's-foot lotus was the first. The boy must 

 have seen it, must have trodden on it in the bare 

 woodland pastures, certainly run about on it, with 

 wet naked feet from the bathing; but the boy was 

 not conscious of it. This was the first, when the 

 desire came to identify and to know, fixing upon it 

 by means of a pale and feeble picture. In the 

 largest pasture there were different soils and climates; 

 it was so large it seemed a little country of itself 

 then the more so because the ground rose and fell, 

 making a ridge to divide the view and enlarge by 

 uncertainty. The high sandy soil on the ridge where 

 the rabbits had their warren; the rocky soil of the 

 quarry; the long grass by the elms where the rooks 

 built, under whose nests there were vast unpalatable 

 mushrooms the true mushrooms with salmon gills 

 grew nearer the warren ; the slope towards the nut- 

 tree hedge and spring. Several climates in one field: 

 the wintry ridge over which leaves were always driving 

 in all four seasons of the year; the level sunny plain 

 and fallen cromlech still tall enough for a gnomon 

 and to cast its shadow in the treeless drought; the 

 moist, warm, grassy depression; the lotus -grown 

 slope, warm and dry. 



If you have been living in one house in the country 

 for some time, and then go on a visit to another, 

 though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a 



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