288 FIELD ANG 1IEDGEROW. 
on the top. There too the yellowhammers stay. In 
the crevices blue tits build deep inside passages that 
abruptly turn, and baffle egg-stealers. Partridges come 
over with a whir, but just clearing the top, gliding on 
extended wings, which to the eye look like a slight brown 
crescent. The waggoners who go by know that the great 
hawthorn bastions are favourite resorts of wood-pigeons 
and missel-thrushes. The haws are ripe in autumn and 
the ivy berries in spring, so that the bastions yield a 
double crop. A mallow, the mauve petals of which even 
the dust of the road cannot impair, flowers here and 
there on the dry bank below, and broad moon-daisies 
among the ripe and almost sapless grass of midsummer. 
If any one climbed the wall from the park and looked 
across at the plain of corn-fields in early spring, every- 
where there would be seen brown dots in the air—above 
the first slender green blades ; above the freshly turned 
dark furrows; above the distant plough, the share of 
which, polished like a silver mirror by friction with the 
clods, reflects the sunshine, flashing a heliograph message 
of plenty from the earth ; everywhere brown dots, and 
each a breathing creature—larks ceaselessly singing, and 
all unable to set forth theirjoy. Swiftas is the vibration 
of their throats, they cannot pour the notes fast enough 
to express their eager welcome. As a shower falls from 
the sky, so falls the song of the Jarks. There is no end 
to them: they are everywhere ; over every acre away 
across the plain to the downs, and up on the highest hill. 
Every crust of English bread has been sung over at its 
birth in the green blade by a lark. 
If one looked again in June, the clover itself, a 
treasure of beauty and sweetness, would be out, and the 
south wind would come over acres of flower—acres of 
clover, bears, tares, purple trifolium, far-away crimson 
