20 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



lifting up a thousand silver catkins like a thousand lamps, 

 when there is no light elsewhere. Another day, a wide 

 and windy day, is the jackdaw's, and he goes straight 

 and swift and high like a joyous rider crying aloud on an 

 endless savannah, and, underneath, the rippled pond is as 

 bright as a peacock, and millions of beech leaves drive 

 across the open glades of the woods, rushing to their 

 Acheron. The bush harrow stripes the moist and shining 

 grass; the plough changes the pale stubble into a ridgy 

 chocolate; they are peeling the young ash sticks for hop 

 poles and dipping them in tar. At the dying of that 

 windy day the wind is still; there is a bright pale half- 

 moon tangled in the pink whirl of after-sunset cloud, 

 a sound of blackbirds from pollard oaks against the silver 

 sky, a sound of bells from hamlets hidden among 

 beeches. 



Towards the end of March there are six nights of frost 

 giving birth to still mornings of weak sunlight, of an 

 opaque yet not definitely misty air. The sky is of a 

 milky, uncertain pale blue without one cloud. Eastward 

 the hooded sun is warming the slope fields and melting 

 the sparkling frost. In many trees the woodpeckers 

 laugh so often that their cry is a song. A grassy ancient 

 orchard has taken possession of the visible sunbeams, and 

 the green and gold of the mistletoe glows on the 

 silvered and mossy branches of apple trees. The pale 

 stubble is yellow and tenderly lit, and gives the low hills 

 a hollow light appearance as if they might presently 

 dissolve. In a hundred tiers on the steep hill, the 

 uncounted perpendicular straight stems of beech, and yet 

 not all quite perpendicular or quite straight, are silver- 



