8o THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



Most of them I had not seen for five or six years. My 

 visits vi^ere often formal. I w^alked out and was glad 

 to be back to the lights of the street, the strong tea, the 

 newspaper and the novel. But one day I went farther 

 than usual to a wood where we used to go without inter- 

 ference and, after finding all the blackbirds' and thrushes' 

 and robins' nests within reach, boil a kettle and have tea. 

 I had never in that wood seen any man or woman except 

 my father and mother; never heard a voice except theirs — 

 my father perhaps reading Wordsworth aloud— and the 

 singing birds' and the moorhens' in the pond at the edge; 

 it used to shut out everything but what I had learned to 

 love most, sunshine and wind and flowers and their love. 

 When I saw it again I cried; I really could not help it. 

 For a road had been made alongside of it, and the builder's 

 workmen going to and fro had made a dozen gaps in the 

 hedge and trodden the wood backward and forward and 

 broken down the branches and made it noisome. Worse 

 than all, the field, the golden field where I used to lie 

 among the buttercups and be alone with the blue sky — 

 where I first felt the largeness and dearness and nearness 

 of the blue sky as a child of eight and put up my hand 

 in my delight to draw it through the soft blue substance 

 that seemed so near — the field was enclosed, a chapel 

 built; it was a cemetery for all the unknown herd, strange 

 to one another, strange to every one else, that filled the 

 new houses spreading over the land. 



" At first I was for running away at once. But the 

 sight made me faint-hearted and my legs dragged, and 

 it was all I could do to get home — I mean, to my 

 lodgings. 



