282 ITELD AND HEDGEROW, 
the brooklet, and the still coombe became yet more 
silent. There was an alder, ivy-grown, beside the stream 
—a trée with those lines which take an artist’s fancy. 
Under the roots of aldcrs the water-ousel often creeps 
by day, and the tall heron stalks past at night. Re- 
ceding up the eastern slope of the coombe the sunlight 
Ieft the dark alder’s foliage in the deep shadow of the 
hollow. I went up the slope till I could see the sun, 
and waited ; in a few minutes the shadow reached me, 
and it was sunset; I went still higher, and presently the 
sun set again. A cool wind was drawing up the coombe, 
it was dusky in the recesses of the oaks, and the water 
of the stream had become dark when we emerged from 
the great hollow, and yet without the summer’s evening 
had but just commenced, and the banks were still heated 
by the sun. 
In contrast to the hills and moors which are so open 
and wild, the broad vales beneath are closely shut in 
with hedges. The fields are all of moderate size, unlike 
the great pastures elsewhere, so that the constant suc- 
cession of hedges, one after the other, for ten, twenty, or 
more miles, encloses the country as it were fivefold. 
Most of the fields are square, or at all events right- 
angled, unlike the irregular outline and corners of fields 
in other counties. The number of meadows make it 
appear as if the land was chiefly grass, though there is 
really a fair proportion of arable. Over every green 
hedge there seems a grassy mead ; in every hedge trees 
are numerous, and their thick June foliage, green too, 
gives a sense of green colour everywhere. But this is 
relieved with red—the soil is red, and where the plough 
has been the red furrows stand out so brightly as to 
seem lifted a little from the level. These red squares 
when on the side of rising ground show for many miles. 
