SUSSEX 107 



ascends into the new leaves of the hazels where two 

 tramps are drying their clothes. Many oaks are down, 

 and lie pale and gleaming like mammoth bones among 

 the bluebells in plantations roughened by old flint pits. 



The faggots of oak tops and cords of twisted timber 

 are being made up; the woodmen light a fire and the chips 

 fly from the axes. It is only to these men that I am a 

 stranger as I walk through the land. At first I admire 

 the hardihood and simplicity of their necessary toil among 

 the oaks, but they lift their dark eyes, and then it is as 

 strange as when I pass a white embowered house, and the 

 road is mufHed with straw, and I hear by chance that 

 some one unknown is dying behind that open window 

 through which goes the thrush's song and the children's 

 homeward chatter. Neither townsman or countryman, 

 I cannot know them. The countryman knows their trades 

 and their speech, and is of their kind; the townsman's 

 curiosity wins him a greeting. But in May at least I am 

 content, in the steep little valley made by a tributary of 

 the Medway, its sides wooded with oak and the flowers 

 glad of the sun among the lately cleared undergrowth, 

 and the cuckoo now in this oak and now in that, and 

 the turtle-doves whose voices, in the soft lulls after rain, 

 make the earth seem to lie out sleek in the sun, stretching 

 itself to purr with eyes closed. The cuckoo is gone 

 before we know what his cry is to tell us or to remind 

 us of. 



There are few things as pleasant as the thunder and 

 lightning of May that comes in the late afternoon, when 

 the air is as solid as the earth with stiff grey rain for an 

 hour. There is no motion anywhere save of this perpen- 

 dicular river, of the swaying rain-hit bough and quiver- 



