222 THE LIFE OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 



as in the time of old Rome and Augustan Virgil. From 

 the high pediments dropped the occasional chatter of 

 sparrows, and the chirp of their young in the roofs. The 

 second brood ; they were late ; they would not be in time 

 for the harvest and the fields of stubble. A flight of blue 

 pigeons rose from the central pavement to the level line 

 of the parapet of the western houses. A starling shot 

 across the square, swift, straight, resolute. I looked for 

 the swifts, but they had gone, earliest of all to leave our 

 sky for distant countries. Away in the harvest-field the 

 reaper, pausing in his work, had glanced up at the one 

 stray fleck of cloud in the sky, which to my fancy might 

 be a Cupid on a blue panel, and, seeing it, smiled in the 

 midst of the corn, wiping his blackened face, for he knew 

 it meant dry weather. Heat, and the dust of straw, the 

 violent labour, had darkened his face from brown almost 

 to blackness — a more than swarthiness, a blackness. 

 The stray cloud was spreading out in filaments, each 

 thread drawn to a fineness that ended presently in dis- 

 appearance. It was a sign to him of continued sunshine 

 and the prosperity of increased wages. The sun from 

 whose fiery brilliance I escaped into the shadow was to 

 him a welcome friend ; his neck was bare to the fierceness 

 of the sun. His heart was gladdened because the sky 

 promised him permission to labour till the sinews of his 

 fingers stiffened in their crooked shape (as they held the 

 reaping-hook), and he could hardly open them to grasp 

 the loaf he had gained. 



' So men laboured of old time, whether with plough or 

 sickle or pruning-hook, in the days when Augustan Virgil 

 heard the garrulous swallow, still garrulous. An endless 

 succession of labour, under the brightness of summer, 

 under the gloom of winter ; to my thought it is a sadness 

 even in the colour and light and glow of this hour of sun, 

 this ceaseless labour, repeating the furrow, reiterating the 

 blow, the same furrow, the same stroke — shall we never 

 know how to lighten it, how to live with 'the flowers, the 

 swallows, the sweet, delicious shade, and the murmur of 



