40 WAYFARING NOTIONS 



wind and make Nature's face cheery. But Mr 

 Q. S. was a bad second to spoil-all mist and fog, 

 which, I declare, tasted of the great metropolis 

 fifty miles away. Lapwings, fieldfares, partridges, 

 larks, linnets, yellow-hammers, or ammers — which 

 is, I believe, more correct — went about in a 

 forlorn, chilled-to-the-bone, influenza patient's 

 despondent manner. Even the seagulls seemed 

 too much depressed to quarrel with each other, as 

 is their wont, and the aforementioned pair of 

 rooks, only members of their tribe on view, 

 settled down, after annoying the hawk or eagle 

 off the premises, as if the domain they had been 

 protecting was no good to them when it was left 

 to them to do what they liked with. The hares 

 were unapparent, apparently frozen out, and the 

 out-of-sight conies frozen in. Cissbury Hill, 

 with its vast castrum, fosse, and vallum, loomed 

 ghostly in his gloomy height, and the training 

 gallops were by comparison comforting by reason 

 of hoofprints, reminders of life and go, more or 

 less recently recorded, even if work up to date on 

 them was as impracticable or inadvisable as 

 galloping horses round Admiral Nelson's column 

 in Trafalgar Square. All vegetation was frost- 

 bound, down to the fuzzes, with never a yellow 

 blossom to remind you of kissing's being always 

 in season. The stunted thorns might live, but 

 looked very dead indeed, and past hope of being 

 once more sap rising, not to think of ever again 

 coming white with blossom with spring's fountains 

 playing again. The only touch of warm colour 

 came from the mosses' golden-brown flower or 

 seed stems ; and a farm labourer in amphibious 

 get-up — seafaring down to the boots, where 

 agriculture asserted itself through weighty old 



