232 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



as this reaper. As she grows older she seems to stretch 

 out a connecting hand to long-vanished generations, to 

 the men and women who raised the huge earthen walls 

 of the camps on these hills. She has a trembling small 

 face, wrinkled and yellow like old newspaper, above a 

 windy bunch of rags, chiefly black rags. A Welshwoman 

 who has been in England fifty years, she remembers or 

 thinks of chiefly those Welsh years when, as a girl, she 

 rode a pony into Neath market. She hums a Welsh tune 

 and still laughs at it because she heard it first in those 

 days from one then poor and old and abject — she herself 

 tall and wilful — and the words of it were : " O, my dear 

 boy, don't get married." She would like once again to 

 lie in her warm bed and hear the steady rain falling in the 

 black night upon the mountain. She feels the sharp flint 

 against the sole of her foot and appears not to be annoyed 

 or indignant or resolved to be rid of the pain, but only 

 puzzled by the flintiness of God as she travels, in the long 

 pageant of those who go on living, the lonely downland 

 road among the gorse and the foxgloves, in the hot but 

 still misty morning when the grey and the chestnut horses, 

 patient and huge and shining among the sheaves, wait for 

 the reaping machine to be uncovered and the day's work 

 to begin. 



Through the grey land goes a narrow and flat vale of 

 grass and of thatched cottages. The river winds among 

 willows and makes a green world, out of which the 

 Downs rise suddenly with their wheat. Here stands a 

 farm with dormers in its high yellow roof and a square of 

 beeches round about. There a village, even its walls 

 thatched, flutters white linen and blue smoke against a 

 huge chalk scoop in the Downs behind. For miles only 



