16 FIELD AND HEDGEROW., 
said,‘and I hopes she'll stay there.’ Five dull yellow 
spots on the hedge—gorse bloom—that had remained 
unchanged for so many weeks, took a fresh colour and 
became golden. By the constant passing of the waggons 
and carts along the road that had been so silent it was 
evident that the busy time of spring was here. There 
would be rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it 
would not again be winter. 
Dark patches of cloud—spots of ink on the sky, the 
*messengers’— gu drifting by ; and after them will follow 
the water-carriers, harnessed to the south and west winds, 
drilling the long rows of rain like seed into the earth. 
After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars 
of my prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-' 
grey on the willows across the field, visible even at that 
distance ; so great the change in a few days, the hand 
of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the 
hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch 
thick ; I could snap them with a fillip—only the window- 
pane, to me as impenetrable as the twenty-foot wall of 
the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past 
bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they 
are talking of poling the hops. In it there sat an old 
man, with the fixed stare, the animal-like eye, of extreme 
age; he is over ninety. About him there were some 
few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped . 
against a bed. He was being moved—literally carted— 
to another house, not home, and he said he could not go 
without his bed; he had slept on it for seventy-three 
years. Last Sunday his son—himself old—was carted 
to the churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open 
van ; to-day the father, stil living, goes to what will be 
to him a strange land. His home is broken up—he will 
potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse 
