i 3 4 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



adumbrated in ochreous smudges or tawny negative 

 lines on a general grey of nothingness. Presently, as 

 we march steadily eastward, one hill looms up darker 

 than the others. It is behind that hill that the sun 

 must be. On another morning we should take it for 

 the black cloud that so often enviously accompanies 

 an English dawn, but there are to be no clouds to- 

 day. Presently the trees on its summit appear, with 

 tiny rounded tops, and the morning sky showing 

 between their outflanking trunks. 



The sky at the zenith is of that indefinite, evasive 

 blue with which sometimes very artistic jewellers 

 display their diamonds. They copied it, of course, 

 as best they could, from the midnight sky in which 

 the stars shine. But the morning sky is altogether 

 an elusive colour. It is all the colours of an opal, 

 without the opal's liveliness of change, but yet seem- 

 ing to change invisibly as we look at any part of it. 

 At first sight it is of a pink flush no, it is ceru- 

 lescent ; nay, pea-green shrouded in French grey. Or 

 it is the blue of blue eyes veined with fire, provided 

 always that you cannot see the veins, or that they 

 come and go like a perfectly visionary network. The 

 old painters of stained-glass windows did the best 

 they could by doing their skies in a design of flowers, 

 and no painter since has got nearer the mystery than 

 that. 



On the opal eastern sky is drawn with exquisite 

 softness but complete fidelity to detail the compli- 

 cated tracery of the trees. The rambling, upright 

 twigs, with catkins on them that seem at almost any 

 distance as woolly as they are ; the weeping besoms 

 of the wych-elm ; the sturdy, strenuous oak, softened, 



