1 6 Wild Life in a Southern County 



of the cloudless sky. The shepherds say the mists carry 

 away the rain ; certainly it does not come. 



Every now and then promising signs exhibit them- 

 selves. A black bank of vapour receives the setting sun, 

 and in the east huge mountainous clouds with beetling 

 precipices and caverns, in which surely the thunder lurks, 

 swell and roll upwards in the hush of the evening. The 

 farmer unrolls his canvas over the new-made hayrick, 

 which is not yet thatched, thinking that a torrent will 

 descend in the night ; but no, the morrow is the same. It 

 is a peculiarity of our usually changeable climate that 

 when once the weather has become thoroughly settled 

 either to dry or wet, no signs of alteration are of any value, 

 true as they may be at other times. 



So the heat continues and the drought increases. The 

 f land -springs' breaking out by the sides of the fields have 

 long since disappeared ; the true springs run feebly as the 

 stores of water in the interior of the earth gradually grow 

 less. Great cracks open in the clay of the meadows down 

 below in the vale rifts, wide and deep, into which you 

 may thrust your walking-stick to the handle. Up here 

 on the hills the turf grows hard and inelastic; it loses 

 that ' springy ' feel under the foot which makes it so 

 pleasant to walk upon. The grass becomes dull in tint 

 and touches like wire all the sap dried from it, and 

 nothing but fibre left. Beneath the chalk is moistureless, 

 and nothing can grow on it. The by-roads and paths 

 made with the chalk or c rubble ' glare in the sunlight, and 

 the flints scattered so thickly about the ploughed fields 

 seem to radiate heat. All things that should look green 

 are brown and dusty ; even the leaves on the elms seem 

 dusty. The wheat only flourishes, tall and strong deep 

 tinted yellow here, a ruddy, golden bronze yonder, with 



