45° FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
feeling the crop with his hand one side, and opening it 
with his walking-stick the other. It rolls the wavelets 
carelessly as marbles to the shore ; the red cattle redden 
the pool and stand in their own colour. The green cater- 
pillar swings as he spins his thread and lengthens his 
cable to the tide of air, descending from the tree ; before 
he can slip it the whitethroat takes him. With a thrust 
the wind hurls the swift fifty miles faster on his way ; it 
ruffles back the black velvet of the mole peeping forth 
from his burrow. Apple bloom and crab-apple bloom 
have been blown long since athwart the furrows over the 
orchard wall; May petals and June roses scattered ; 
the pollen and the seeds of the meadow-grasses thrown 
on the threshing-floor of earth in basketfuls. Thistle 
down and dandelion down, the brown down of the goat’s- 
beard ; by-and-by the keys of the sycamores twirling 
aslant—the wind carrics them all on its back, gossamer 
web and great heron’s vanes—the same weight to the 
wind ; the drops of the waterfall blown aside sprinkle the 
bright green ferns, The voice of the cuckoo in his season 
travels on the zephyr, and the note comes to the most 
distant hill, and deep into the deepest wood. 
The light and fire of summer are made beautiful by 
the air, without whose breath the glorious summer were 
all spoiled. Thick are the hawthorn leaves, many deep 
on the spray ; and beneath them there is a twisted and. 
intertangled winding in and out of boughs, such as no 
curious ironwork of ancient artist could equal; through 
the leaves and metal-work of boughs the soft west wind 
wanders at its ease. Wild wasp and tutored bee sing 
sideways on their course as the breeze fills their vanes; 
with broad coloured sails boomed out, the butterfly drifts . 
alee. Beside a brown coated stone in the shadowed 
stream a brown trout watches for the puffs that slay the 
