128 FIELD AND HEDGEROW, 
one in an instant, and take it down asxyou would a book 
from a shelf. The millions of coloured etchings that 
have fixed themselves there in the course of those years 
are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet 
they cannot occupy the space of a pin’s point. They 
have neither length, breadth, nor thickness; none of the 
qualifications of mathematical substance, and yet they 
must in some way be a species of matter. The fact in- 
dicates the possibility of still more subtle existences, 
Now I wish I could put before you a coloured, living, 
moving picture, like that of the camera obscura, of some 
other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were painted 
on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin 
of green downs. They were large enough to have the 
charm of vague, indefinite extension, and yet all could 
be distinctly seen. Large squares of green corn that was 
absorbing its yellow from the sunlight ; chess squares, 
irregularly placed, of brown furrows; others of rich 
blood-red trifolium ; others of scarlet sainfoin and blue 
lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies here and there. Not 
all of these, of course, at once, but they followed so 
quickly in the summer days that they seemed to be one 
and the same pictures,and had you painted them al- 
together on the same canvas, together with ripe wheat, 
they would not have seemed out of place. Never was 
such brilliant colour; it was chalk there, and on chalk 
the colours are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the 
yellow mustard and charlock a keener yellow; the an, 
‘too, is pellucid. Waggons going along the tracks ; men 
and women hoeing; ricks of last year still among 
clumps of trees, where the chimneys and gables of farm- 
houses are partly visible ; red-tiled barns away yonder ; 
a shepherd moving his hurdles; away again the black 
funnel of an idle engine, and the fly-whcel above haw- 
