122 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



has reached its fulness. Day after day its warm and 

 fragrant snow clouded the earth with light, and yet we 

 waited, thinking surely to-morrow it will be fairer still, 

 and it was, and the next day we thought the same and 

 we were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay 

 upon the grass, an empty shell, the vest of departed loveli- 

 ness, and another year was over. The broad grass is full 

 of buttercups' gold or it is sullen silvery under a burning 

 afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky, the blue 

 sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the 

 red cattle are under the elms; the unrippled water slides 

 under sullen silvery willows. 



The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in 

 upon small tracts of wood — upon a group of walnuts in 

 the bronze of their fine, small leaf — upon downland grass, 

 and exposes blue sky and white cloud, but then returns 

 and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash and 

 the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying 

 and crying continually in the hollow vale. 



Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under 

 the darker leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The 

 oak-apples are large and rosy. The wind is high, and the 

 thunder is away somewhere behind the pink mountains 

 in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And 

 yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the 

 beechen green; the coombes and the beeches above and 

 around their grassy slopes of juniper are soft and dim, 

 and far withdrawn, and the nightjar's voice is heard as if 

 the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come; the 

 plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all 

 night, yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip 

 butterfly on the leopard's-bane's dead flower. 



