64 THE LIFE OF THE FIELDS. 



smooth and columnar, hard as iron. A hundred times 

 the mowing-grass has grown up around it, the birds 

 have built their nests, the butterflies fluttered by, and 

 the acorns dropped from the oaks. It is a long, long 

 time, counted by artificial hours or by the seasons, but 

 it is longer still in another way. The greenfinch in 

 the hawthorn yonder has been there since I came out, 

 and all the time has been happily talking to his love. 

 He has left the hawthorn indeed, but only for a 

 minute or two, to fetch a few seeds, and comes back 

 each time more full of song-talk than ever. He notes 

 no slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass ; 

 it is nothing to him and his lady dear that the sun, as 

 seen from his nest, is crossing from one great bough of 

 the oak to another. The dew even in the deepest and 

 most tangled grass has long since been dried, and some 

 of the flowers that close at noon will shortly fold their 

 petals. The morning airs, which breathe so sweetly, 

 come less and less frequently as the heat increases. 

 Vanishing from the sky, the last fragments of cloud 

 have left an untarnished azure. Many times the bees 

 have returned to their hives, and thus the index of the 

 day advances. It is nothing to the greenfinches ; all 

 their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny 

 moment is to them all in all. So deeply are they rapt 

 in it that they do not know whether it is a moment or 

 a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for love. 

 And with all their motions and stepping from bough 

 to bough, they are not restless; they have so much 

 time, you see. So, too, the whitethroat in the wild 

 parsley ; so, too, the thrush that just now peered out 

 and partly fluttered his wings as he stood to look. A 



