148 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



with almost a shock of familiarity. He was my fa- 

 vourite author for several months thereafter! 



It was more than a quarter of a century ago that my 

 gray stone wall gave me so profoundly the sensation of 

 the sea, rising above the inland meadows of Middlesex, 

 sharp against the sky. Yet the mystery, the lure, the 

 call to wonder and to dreams, which the ocean holds for 

 the heart of youth were crystallized for me by that stone 

 wall upon its ridge, and even to-day when I approach 

 the sea, f eeling its invisible presence in the great drop of 

 sky behind some dune of sand, it is the memory of my 

 wall which wakes and stirs within me, and I hear the hot 

 cicada click of the mowing machines in the fields and feel 

 once more the strange pain of dreaming boyhood when 

 the imagination has taken full command. 



The other day I wandered to an upland pasture 

 and heard the mowers in a distant field. The day was 

 hot. The grasshoppers rose in a startled swarm about 

 my knees as I walked. The sunshine in the valley 

 was like an amber flood and the distant mountains 

 were smoky gray, almost like waves of floating vapour. 

 I lay down presently under the shade of a laurel bush, 

 to pick and munch some checkerberry leaves which 

 I saw growing there and suddenly from this lower 

 angle I saw the near-by wall sharp against the sky, and 

 nothing beyond save the great spaces of aerial perspec- 

 tive and an Himalayan cumulus. It was my old stone 

 wall, and beyond lay the sea! No, beyond lay the 



