72 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



land. One stands at the end of the elm troop that 

 swerves and clusters about its tiled roof, grey cliff of 

 chimney-stack, and many gables; the stables with newer 

 tiles; the huge slope of the barn; the low mossy cart-lodge 

 and its wheels and grounded shafts; the pale straw stacks 

 and the dark hay ricks with leaning ladders. A hundred 

 sheep-bells rush by with a music of the hills in the wind. 

 The larks are singing as if they never could have done 

 by nightfall. It is now the hour of sunset, and windy. 

 All the sky is soft and dark-grey-clouded except where 

 the sun, just visible and throbbing in its own light, looks 

 through a bright window in the west with a glow. 

 Exactly under the sun the grass and wheat is full both 

 of the pure effulgence and of the south-west wind, 

 rippling and glittering : there is no sun for anything else 

 save the water. North of the sun and out of its power 

 lies a lush meadow, beyond it a flat marshland cut by 

 several curves of bright water, above that a dark church 

 on a wooded mound, and then three shadowy swoops of 

 Down ending at a spire among trees. 



South-west, the jagged ridgy cluster of a hillside town, 

 a mill and a castle, stand dark and lucid, and behind them 

 the mere lines of still more distant downs. 



