262 



SUMMER 



And most of these other harvests are murmurous with the 

 hum of winged insects. It is an education in summer sounds 

 to walk between fields of different clovers and vetches, as one 

 may on some farms. On one side there may be a surge of 

 continuous sound of hive-bees, on the other scarcely a note ; 

 and each crop will draw more or fewer bees in proportion to 

 the depth of the flower. The hive-bees which exult in the 

 white clover cannot penetrate to the honey of the new red 

 clovers. Their instruments lack the length of the proboscis 

 of the noisier bumbles, whose numbers, it is said, not wholly 

 without book, make or mar the crop of seed clover. 



But these crops for all their sweet scents and bright 

 colours have not the charm of a wheat-field, where the flower 

 is only visible as a dust and the fruit only visited by sparrows. 

 Some of the charm of the full harvest remains even to the 

 bristly stubble, with the shining grooves worn by the carrying 

 carts and wagons. But a stubble-field, like fair Melrose, 

 should be visited at night. The cutting of the wheat has 

 been a calamity to the partridges and the rats and rabbits 

 and the harvest mice. You may see this in a rather repellent 

 form when the sporting characters of a village gather round 

 the last rectangle of standing corn in a harvest, and armed 

 with sticks if not with guns hunt the creatures that are finally 

 driven from this refuge. But those that survive the calamity, 

 or are not carried off to the stuffy but safe security of the 



