20 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 



speck in the middle of the blackness. It looked very 

 beautiful, and instantly recalled to my mind the great 

 dandelion discs in the sunshine of summer. Yet 

 certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps, if ten 

 people answered this question, they would each give 

 different answers. Again, a bright day or a cloudy, the 

 presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of other 

 colours, alters it very much ; for the dandelion is not a 

 glazed colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is 

 like a sponge, and adds to its own hue that which is 

 passing, sucking it up. 



The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they 

 blue ? Ought they not to be dark ? Is it really blue, 

 or an illusion ? And what is their colour when you see 

 the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a 

 leaning pillar ? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew 

 have a different brown from those that are dry, and the 

 upper surface of the green growing leaf is different from 

 the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet 

 one in October, has so toned down his spring yellow 

 that you might fancy him a pale green leaf floating 

 along the road. There is a shining, quivering, gleaming ; 

 there is a changing, fluttering, shifting ; there is a mixing, 

 weaving — varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with 

 dots and veins, all playing over the purple heath ; a very 

 tangle of many-toned lights and hues. Then come the 

 apples : if you look upon them from an upper window, so 

 as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate 

 streaks of scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern 

 horizon before sunrise ; golden tints under bronze, and 

 apple-green, and some that the wasps have hollowed, more 

 glowingly beautiful than the rest ; sober leaves and black 

 and white swallows : to see it you must be high up, as 

 if the apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So 



