JUNE 129 



It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden 

 or Golden Age Nature has in her gift, as if she silently 

 recorded the backward dreams of each generation and 

 reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is, for instance, 

 an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the 

 milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their 

 breath in the white road between banks of hazel and 

 thorn. The boy who is driving them to the morning's 

 pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively, in turn, 

 as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward : " Wo, 

 Cherry ! Now, Dolly ! Wo, Fancy ! Strawberry ! . . . 

 Blanche! . . . Blossom! . . . Cowslip! . . . Rosy! 

 Smut ! . . . Come along, Handsome ! . . . Wo, Snow- 

 drop ! . . . Lily ! . . . Darky ! . . . Roany ! . . . Come 

 along, Annie ! " Here the road is pillowed with white 

 aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the 

 brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry 

 scent of nettle and cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect 

 mingling of harebell and foxglove among the bracken 

 and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into 

 the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes 

 to their lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy- 

 cart, and the boy hangs on the gate to see the men and 

 women walking, black-haired, upright, bright-eyed, and 

 on the name-board of the cart the words : " Naomi Sher- 

 wood, Burley, Hampshire." These things also propose 

 to the roving, unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, 

 one that is passing, not, let us hope, the very last. 



Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, 



come to have a rich symbolical significance; they return 



persistently and, as it were, ceremoniously on festal days 



but meaning I know not what. For example, I 



K 



