A MIDLAND BELFRY 29 



to restore memory of the old place. There is a heron, 

 looking like some &quot; native companion &quot; of Australia, 

 feeding apparently at a sheep trough, but he soon flies 

 off deliberately and yet quickly to the more congenial 

 brook, where, in spite of droughts, fish still survive. 

 You would swear that some of them must have &quot; aesti- 

 vated &quot; beneath the mud. 



Midwinter is the time when, for all the clay and slush 

 and foul ways, this country is most glorious in recollec 

 tion. The boughs of the &quot; Huntingdonshire oaks &quot; are 

 very bare. The children collect for mere curiosity leaves 

 that have lost all their substance except the symmetry of 

 the ribs and look like little trees themselves. You may 

 see the floor of the several spinneys almost white with 

 the crackling stems of the kexes. The tree tops through 

 which you see the low, white farmhouse and its white 

 railing show a delicacy of form and a filigree pattern 

 which always excel in beauty the leafy domes, at any rate 

 for those who have travelled in overseas lands, where all 

 the trees are evergreen. You may, perhaps, find in the 

 half-neglected little garden the dusky geranium, the 

 greater celandine, and the heartsease that have survived 

 from cultivated gardens of forgotten centuries ; and the 

 top of the huge yew reminds us that it is a forest tree, 

 not a hedge plant. How the thrushes, especially the 

 missels known in the village as &quot; the squorking thrush &quot; 

 raid the berries, that now gleam among the wide 

 boughs, only less conspicuously than the coral berries 

 on the pistillate hollies awaiting the arrival of the greedier 

 fieldfares from over the North Sea ! 



How homely and historic the general scene. You 

 may read at once the tale of its centuries of continuity. 

 Trees are everywhere grown for no other purpose than 

 the delight of the folk in their contours. All the land is 



