258 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



mossy thatch; and the swallows fly low and slowly about 

 the trees. 



First beeches line the rising and descending road past 

 a church whose ivied tombstones commemorate men of 

 Cornish name as far as an inn and a sycamore nobly 

 balanced upon a pedestal of matted roots. Then there 

 are ash-trees on either side and ricks of straw wetted to 

 an orange hue, and beyond them the open cornland, and 

 rising out of it an all-day-long procession in the south, 

 the great company of the Downs again, some tipped with 

 wood, some bare; in the north, a broken chain of woods 

 upon low but undulating land seem the vertebrae of a 

 forest of old time stretching from east to west like the 

 Downs. Hither and thither the drunken pewits cry over 

 the furrows, and thousands of rooks and daws wheel over 

 the stubble. As the day grows old it grows sweet and 

 golden and the rain ceases, and the beauty of the Downs 

 in the humid clearness does not long allow the eyes to 

 wander away from them. At first, when the sun breaks 

 through, all silver bright and acclaimed by miles of clouds 

 in his own livery, the Downs below are violet, and have 

 no form except where they carve the sky with their long 

 arches. It is the woods northward that are chiefly glorified 

 by the light and warmth, and the glades penetrating them 

 and the shining stubble and the hedges, and the flying 

 wood-pigeons and the cows of richest brown and milky 

 white; the road also gleams blue and wet. But as the 

 sun descends the light falls on the Downs out of a bright 

 cave in the gloomy forest of sky, and their flanks are olive 

 and their outlines intensely clear. From one summit to 

 another runs a string of trees like cavalry connecting one 

 beech clump with another, so that they seem actually to 



