16 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



said, 'and I hopes she'll stay there.' Five dull yellow 

 spots on the hedge— gorse bloom — that had remained 

 unchanged for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and 

 became golden. By the constant passing of the waggons 

 and carts along the road that had been so silent it was 

 evident that the busy time of spring was here. There 

 would be rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it 

 would not again be winter. 



Dark patches of cloud — spots of ink on the sky, the 

 1 messengers' — go drifting by ; and after them will follow 

 the water-carriers, harnessed to the south and west winds, 

 drilling the long rows of rain like seed into the earth. 

 After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars 

 of my prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow- 

 grey on the willows across the field, visible even at that 

 distance ; so great the change in a few days, the hand 

 of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the 

 hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch 

 thick ; I could snap them with a fillip — only the window- 

 pane, to me as impenetrable as the twenty-foot wall of 

 the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past 

 bearing a strange load among the carts of spring ; they 

 are talking of poling the hops. In it there sat an old 

 man, with the fixed stare, the animal-like eye, of extreme 

 age ; he is over ninety. About him there were some 

 few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped 

 against a bed. He was being moved — literally carted — 

 to another house, not home, and he said he could not go 

 without his bed ; he had slept on it for seventy-three 

 years. Last Sunday his son — himself old — was carted 

 to the churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open 

 van ; to-day the father, still living, goes to what will be 

 to him a strange land. His home is broken up — he will 

 potter no more with maize for the chicken ; the gorse 



