238 OCTOBER 



or acer platanoides, seen between the pillars of English 

 scenery, the green and yellow elms. A distinctive glory 

 no other country possesses and it is at its highest in 

 October is the hedgerow, in which, against all reason 

 ableness, an occasional oak is allowed to flourish. The 

 best are tall and untrimmed. The filigree and its chains 

 of briar berry are alternated with holly already diapered 

 with coral, and this gives place to a bush that is almost a 

 tree of spindle so bright in leaf that the bright berries are 

 obscure, and all the colours half-cloaked by a mist of the 

 feathery seeds of the wild clematis. 



3- 



Opposite the cottage, which with the others in &quot; The 

 Bottom &quot; faces south, is a grassfield sloping at an angle 

 to the north which each evening glows a deep golden as 

 the sun sinks. Each dry bent of cocksfoot grass, itself 

 yellow, reflects the red and yellow light. The field has 

 been left desert. Its owner has departed ; and for a 

 year at any rate found no successor. The aftergrowth is 

 so thick and green below the tall and now seedless straws 

 that even to-day if it were cut the crop would fill a stack 

 yard. You do not walk across it ; you wade ; and the 

 only regulax frequenters, the rabbits, have made runs 

 so deep down that even a hare or perhaps a fox would 

 scarcely be visible. Other fields in the neighbourhood 

 take on the same golden glow ; and it is the mark of a 

 land that has been left to itself, of a garden of Eden that 

 at the fall has produced not thorns and briars but a 

 golden glory. 



Walking across such a field we found lying on a flat 

 tened bed of grass a fresh wood-pigeon s egg, a delicate 

 pink, like the feathers of an ibis, with the shining of the 



