THE SKIRMISH LINE OF SPRING 43 



out on the edge of a clearing, perhaps, and look across a 

 rolling pasture where a few belated drifts of snow are 

 still stretched like fingers of Winter keeping a last grip 

 on the soil, to some white house and mouse-gray barns, 

 and to watch tiny figures moving about in the orchard, 

 piling the litter from trimming on the fires, which are 

 sending up their fragrant smoke plumes into the air. 

 As the sun drops into the west, these fires will burn low 

 and their gray smoke will be touched with salmon-rose, 

 even as the great white cumuli drifting in the sky 

 above. A little later, and they will glow like red eyes in 

 the dusk of the orchard, but the pungent fragrance of 

 their smoke will scent the quiet spring night long after 

 the flicker of their flames has disappeared. 



There is a time when Spring, to the eye, is curiously 

 like Autumn, as if the seasons, passing one into the 

 other, went through the same process. That is the 

 time when the hillsides are tapestried. The colours of 

 Spring, of course, are not quite the same, and the texture 

 is totally different. Nevertheless, between the green of 

 Summer and the reds and grays of Winter, comes a time 

 both in October and in April when an intricate warm 

 pattern is woven up the slopes. 



I read in my diary for April 6th, a few years ago: 



A day of alternate snow squalls and sunshine, Spring and 

 Winter contending. Walking home past Monument Mountain 

 we saw a steep west shoulder now take the sun, now vanish 

 into a nothingness of white vapour. Emerging once in full 



