AN UMBRELLA MAN 187 



everywhere. They were seen in the rickyards where 

 grand haystacks, newly thatched, stood around ancient 

 walnut-trees. Even the beeches had a decorous look in 

 their smooth boles and perfect lavish foliage. The little 

 patches of flowery turf by the roadside and at corners 

 were brighter and warmer than ever, as the black bees 

 and the tawny skipper butterflies flew from bloom to 

 bloom of the crimson knapweed. Amplest and most 

 unctuous of all in their expression of the ceremonious 

 leisure of the day and the maturity of the season were 

 the cart-horses. They leaned their large heads benignly 

 over the rails or gates; their roan or chestnut flanks were 

 firm and polished; manes, tails and fetlocks spotless; now 

 and then they lifted up their feet and pressed their toes 

 into the ground, showing their enormous shoes that shone 

 and were of girth sufficient to make a girdle for the 

 lightest of the maids passing by. 



Sunday with not too strict a rod of black and white 

 ruled the land and made it all but tedious except in the 

 longest of the green lanes, which dipped steeply under 

 oaks to a brook muffled in leaves and rose steeply again, 

 a track so wet in spring and full of the modest golden 

 green of saxifrage flowers that only the hottest Sunday 

 ever saw it disturbed except by carter and horses. In a 

 hundred yards the oak-hidden windings gave the traveller 

 a feeling of reclusion as if he were coiled in a spool; very 

 soon a feeling of possession ripened into one of armed 

 tyranny if another's steps clattered on the stones above. 

 Sometimes in a goodly garden a straight alley of shadows 

 leads away from the bright frequented borders to we 

 know not quite whither, and perhaps, too much delighted 

 with half-sad reverie, never learn, smother even the 



