20 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
' spect in the middle of the blackness. It looked very 
beautiful, and instantly recalled to my mind the great 
dandelion discs in the sunshine of summer. Yet 
certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps, if ten 
people answered this question, they would each give 
different answers. Again, a bright day or a cloudy, the 
presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of other 
colours, alters it very much ; for the dandelion is not a 
glazed colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is 
like a sponge, and adds to its own hue that which is 
passing, sucking it up. 
The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they 
blue? Ought they not to be dark? Is it really blue, 
or an illusion? And what is their colour when you see 
the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a 
leaning pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew 
have a different brown from those that are dry, and the 
upper surface of the green growing leaf is different from 
the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet 
one in October, has so toned down his spring yellow 
that you might fancy him a pale green leaf floating 
along theroad. There isa shining, quivering, gleaming ; 
there isa changing, fluttering, shifting ; there isa mixing, -. 
weaving—varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with |” 
dots and veins, alf playing over the purple heath ; a very 
tangle of many-toned lights and hues. Then come the 
apples: if you look upon them from an upper window, so 
as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate 
streaks of scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern 
horizon before sunrise ; golden tints under bronze, and 
apple-green, and some that the wasps have hollowed, more 
glowingly beautiful than the rest ; sober leaves and black - 
and white swallows : to see it you must be high up, as 
if the apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So 
