THE END OF SUMMER 261 



and then much more decidedly so that it resembles a gun- 

 barrel and stock; and just where the stock begins it is 

 carved with something like a trigger-guard; the whole 

 being well proportioned, graceful but strong. In all the 

 best gates of Kent, Sussex and Surrey and the South 

 Country there is an approach to this form, usually without 

 the trigger-guard, but sometimes having instead a much 

 more elaborate variation of it which takes away from the 

 dignity and simplicity of the gate. At the road's edge 

 crooked quince-trees lean over a green pond and green 

 but nearly yellow straight reeds; and four cart-horses, three 

 sorrels and a grey, are grouped under one stately walnut. 



These things mingle their power with that of the 

 silence and the wooded distance under the blue and rosy 

 west. The slow dying of a train's roar beats upon the 

 shores of the silence and the distance, and is swallowed up 

 in them like foam in sand, and adds one more trophy to 

 the glory of the twilight. 



Night passes, and the white dawn is poured out over 

 the dew from the folds in low clouds of infinitely 

 modulated grey. Autumn is clearly hiding somewhere in 

 the long warm alleys under the green and gold of the 

 hops. The very colours of the oast houses seem to wait 

 for certain harmonies with oaks in the meadows and 

 beeches in the steep woods. The songs, too, are those 

 of the drowsy yellow-hammer, of the robin moodily 

 brooding in orchards yellow spotted and streaked, of the 

 unseen wandering willow-wren singing sweetly but in a 

 broken voice of a matter now forgotten, of the melancholy 

 twit of the single bullfinch as he flies. The sudden lyric 

 of the wren can stir no corresponding energy in the land 

 which is bowed, still, comfortable, like a deep-uddered 



