108 East and West 
ting accompaniment of these summer idylls. 
They voice that quiet content, that simple 
gladness that Nature now inspires by her gra- 
cious mood. Rustling corn and domestic 
apple trees are themselves not less com- 
panionable than the bees and birds, and all 
seem to lend themselves charmingly to our life 
and to be a part of it. The keynote of that 
life is a recognition of the beauty of common 
things, a sympathy for every-day scenes, a 
being at home in Nature. 
In such a country the fields naturally form 
the major part of our landscape. From the 
first appearance of the wheat, they are 
saturated with the life of the earth and the 
light of the sky. On some misty day, over 
the sodden ground appears a tinge of green, 
the prelude—so ethereal as hardly to be re- 
cognised by our grosser vision—to that epic 
we are thenceforth to read as we saunter. 
Day by day, there is a deepening green, later 
a deepening yellow, and the beauty of the 
wheat is one and of the oats another, and so 
again of the barley and of the rye-fields. 
As one stands upon some knoll—a drumlin 
very likely—the rolling fields stretch far away 
on every hand, broken here and there only by 
patches of deep green woods or by grey-green 
