THE HEAT OF THE SUN 307 



after two or three days' hot sunshine, that definitely marks 

 the turn to summer from spring. In drought this bronzy 

 darkness is intensified. Sycamores so exquisitely fresh 

 when the buds first slip their tissue wrappings in the days 

 of the dogstar show blacker in the landscape than pines in 

 winter. Elms and ashes in the pastures, beeches in the 

 woods, and apple-trees in the orchards, are almost as 

 swarthy ; and the twisted hawthorn bushes are as black as 

 they were white with bloom a few weeks before. It is a 

 landscape of southern Europe transferred to England, yet 

 with a difference. In a typical English landscape there is 

 no such background of bare and rocky hills as usually seems 

 waiting anywhere in the Mediterranean watershed to send a 

 thirsty glitter through the summer heat, and make the whole 

 scene appropriate and natural. The soft green contours of 

 our hills testify to a moist and fostering sky, and give an 

 uneasy setting to the waterless lowlands. The even 

 expanse of Kentish or Midland pastures is an obvious 

 adaptation to a climate which will grow a real turf sward, 

 such as is absent from Continental lowlands ; and although 

 the turf is not as dead as it looks, it is dead enough to give 

 an unhomely appearance to the landscape. 



Instead of cicadas which shrill the more joyfully for the 

 fiercest heat, our fields have little blue butterflies, which are 

 gravely disturbed by excess of drought. When the pastures 

 grow scorched, and possibly the nectar in the flowers more 

 thick and thirsty, blue butterflies wander away in search of 

 water. By nine o'clock in the morning, long before the 

 hours of greatest heat, they flutter in crowds on the moist 

 gravel at the edge of brooks and ponds, or suck up the 

 spillings from the farm water-carts in the village street. 

 Common white butterflies slake their thirst in the same way, 

 and the anxious flocks of blue and white insects titillating 



