In the spring of the year, July seems as far off as middle-age seems to youth, and almost as undesirable. But when midsummer-day is past and gone, whether in human life or the year’s progress, we look at things with clearer, more widely ranging eyes. The man in his prime strength, the season at the summit of its beauty—these are fairer things than the childhood and the springtime that have gone to make them. For the greater must be all the greater and more wonderful, because it contains the wondrous less.

Here is the first day of July come, and ever since sunrise I have been straying about the field-paths and lanes, wending home, indeed, only when the fierce noontide heat and a ravening hunger combined to drive me thither. There was this fierce, tropic quality in the sunlight from the very first. Though the gilt arrow on the church dial pointed barely to four o’clock, the level sunbeams struck hot and bright on the face; and the dew in the grass by the laneside was shrinking visibly with every moment. In an hour the last water-bell was gone from the shadiest nook in the wood. Only the teasels could defy the thirsty sun, and these kept their water-traps over-brimming, as if fed from a magic source, far into the heat of the day.

There are many common things of the country-side—small facts to be learned for the trouble of a glance—which are little known because the glance is seldom given. As I passed along the hedge where the teasels stood up straight as a row of church spires, the glitter of the water in their leaf-cups caught my eye, and I stopped to look at them. I had always thought of the teasels as natural drinking-places for the bees, and other flying or creeping things; but now I saw that their use was very different. Studying the plant carefully, the whole meaning of the thing dawned on me at last. The teasel must be a flesh-eater, more greedy and destructive than any spider in the land. In the cups a host of creatures lay drowned; and upon the green, translucent leaves and stems there crawled multitudes of others, all destined for the same fate. There were in the water not only small insects, but bumble-bees, large caterpillars and slugs, even broad-winged night-moths that had fallen to the teasel’s snare. I saw also that the pools of water insulating every stem served not as traps alone, but actually as digestive cells, wherein the carcases of the teasel’s prey were gradually resolved into the slime that lay at the bottom of each cup. Somehow, I conjectured, this must be absorbed into the tissue of the plant; and cutting one of the stems asunder, just where the water-holding leaves embraced it, I came upon what seemed proof of this—a ring of apertures at the base of each cup—sink holes, in fact—leading into the substance of the stem.

The path wound up a hill-side over a field of tares, rippling away before me through the sea of purple blossom until it ended abruptly against the blue sky far above. And here another minute wonder brought me to a halt. Though it was so early, the hive-bees were out and about in their thousands. The great field was besieged by them. The air throbbed with their music. A madness for honey-making seemed upon them all; and yet, of all the busy thousands upon thousands set loose amidst what seemed illimitable forage-ground, nowhere could I see a hive-bee upon a flower. I went down on hands and knees for a closer view, believing at first that my eyes were playing false with me. But there was no doubt about it. Though on every side the great furry bumble-bees were seizing upon, and dragging open the purple blooms of the tares, the hive-bees never touched these, for all they were in so huge a heat and flurry of work.

Now I knew that, while every other insect under heaven has its times of relaxation, deeming moments given over to dancing in a sunbeam or basking on a wall as moments not ill-spent, the honey-bee allows herself no such wasteful delights. If she were here in this tare-field in her thousands, and here she was, she came for no other purpose than a useful one. Clearly, therefore, the hive-bees were getting nectar in abundance: yet how, if they were not seeking it in the flowers?

Another minute’s careful watch resolved the mystery. The tare-plant can almost rank with the slug-devouring teasel as a curiosity of the country-side. Knowing well that the hive-bee’s tongue is not long enough to reach the sweets at the bottom of its flower-cup, the tare provides a special feast outside. At the base of each leaf-and flower-stalk, just where these join on to the main stem, will be found a little green flap or fin. In the centre of this fin is a valve, from which exudes a thick sweet liquid. If you are quicker than the bee, you may see the tiny globule shining in the sun as you turn the plant up. But even as you look, a bee fusses in between your fingers, drinks up the liquid in a moment, and hums off to the next stalk. If we can extend no more sympathy to the bee in her folly of never-ending labours than to a lily-of-the-field at toil, we must at least concede something for her fearlessness. A peep into her own looking-glass is not always all of virtue’s reward.

Over the field of purple tares, and on through the cornfields—wheat waving high and green, with the scarlet poppies flushing midway down in its murmuring depths. Who would have hawthorn and buttercups, the bridal white and gold of spring, when he can have poppies by the million, and roses, a wagon-load to be gathered from every hedgerow, if he will? Where I stood, breast-high in the wheat-field, the poppies crowded thick together among the green stems, making one unbroken sheet of colour that I could hardly look upon in the full light of the summer sun. A little way onward, and this blood-red flare was softened instantly: a dozen yards away there was nothing but the rustling green of the wheat. Every moment a lark rose out of the corn, singing, or dropped into it like a stone silently out of the blue. The hedgerow on the far side of the field shone with the roses, tremulous, uncertain, in the heated air. Beyond, in the blue mist of woodlands, a blackbird chanted his joy of the morning; and all round me in the distant ring of hills, there were cuckoos chiming, each note clear but double, some of the songs perfect still.

From the wheat, the path led me presently into the oat-fields, green too, but of a cooler, greyer tinge; and full of a stealthy motion and the sound of wind, though scarce a breath was moving overhead. There is something eerie, mysterious, about a field of oats on a hot summer’s morning. It is as though the ears bent together and whispered to each other, passing the word on unceasingly from plant to plant. Looking over the plane of grey-green awns, stretching away under the still sunshine, you see low wavelets rise and fall, furrows come and go; the light changes; or, suddenly, the whole expanse grows mute and still. A gentle, inconstant breeze would produce exactly this effect; but you see it when not a leaf moves in the highest treetops, when even the aspens have hushed their quivering music under the noontide glare. No doubt, in a minor degree, all plants show this movement, whether it be caused by the travelling heat of the sun, or be simply due to the varying impetus of growth. In a great field of corn closely drilled, there are always the separate individualities of the plants comprising it to be reckoned with. That these exist in fact, as well as in fancy, is difficult to demonstrate. But that each field has a communal spirit—often different from, or wholly antagonistic to, that of its near neighbour—is evident. For how else to explain why all the ears of corn in one field lean eastward, and all the ears in the next field may incline normally to the west?

Coming homeward at last, surfeited of sunshine, eyes and ears outwearied with the brilliance and the melody of the day, I stopped awhile in the shadow of the church tower to consider an old familiar, yet perennially interesting thing. Just as I, at fiercest noon, was returning to the shelter of my own cool, ivy-mantled nest, the swifts that built in the tower were lancing back to their homes in the gloom of the belfry. Singly, in twos and threes together, every moment saw them arriving and disappearing through the jalousies; but now none went forth again, though they had been coming and going all the morning long. There they would remain, I knew, quiet in the temperate dark of the old tower, until the sun had got out of its furnace-like mood. And then they would be out and about again, yet filled with a wholly different spirit. And towards sunset they would be tearing round the sky in a madcap chevy-chase, screaming like black imps let out of Inferno.

II

Windlecombe Mead, where the village cricket matches have been played from time immemorial, lies on the gently sloping ground between Arun river and the hills. It was the day of the great annual match with Stavisham, and most of the older villagers had congregated on the benches round the scoring-tent, when, in the sweltering heat of early afternoon, I hurried down to the field with pencil and book. The townsmen, it seemed, had won the toss, and had elected to put the home-team in. Young Tom Clemmer and young Daniel Dray were already at the wickets, taking middle. I looked round at the glum, set faces of the spectators, and felt tragedy in the air.

‘Fower men an’ a parson,’ whispered the old cobbler to me behind his hand, ’a ould rickety chap as caan’t run, an’ five bits o’ lads! Drat that there hay! Heough! Now they’re aff!’

The umpire had called Play. The fast Stavisham bowler—we knew him of old—retired into open country, wheeled, and bore down on the crease like a bull at a gate. Young Daniel ducked, then turned up a face of indignant scarlet. But the ball had gone by for two, and a chuckle of relief spread through the crowd. The bowler prepared to try again.

‘Dan’l’s got th’ sun in ’s eyes,’ said old Dray anxiously, as he watched. ‘’A never can bide that top wicket! Steady now, Dannie, an’ keep a straight bat!’

He roared out the last words. And then, in a moment, we were all on our feet in consternation. The ball had never left the bowler’s hand—that much we were sure of. Daniel stood at his wicket safe and sound, but Tom Clemmer was coming back to the tent, followed by a derisive chorus from the whole field.

‘Hout, Tom? Never hout!’

‘What i’ th’ wureld houted ye, lad?’

‘Hout! Never!—’tis a swindle, Tom!’

Amidst the eager exclamations of his friends, Tom Clemmer strode into the tent, and began slowly to unbuckle his pads. All the time he stared fixedly into space.

‘I could ha’ hup wi’ my fist,’ he said, after a moment’s wrathful silence, addressing no one in particular, ’an’ I could ha’ gi’en that there grocer-chap sech a— But there! ’tis no sense yammerin’! Doan’t ye run out, sir, or ’a ’ll ha’ ye, same as ’a had me!’

He spoke now to the curate, who was preparing to go to the wicket, and the truth dawned upon us at last. The bowler had played Tom a very ancient and very mean-spirited trick. Old Clemmer, regardless of the agony it caused him, stamped his swaddled foot upon the ground.‘An’ to think, Tom!’ he groaned, ‘as ye lit up th’ forge-fire special for ’un only laast Sunday, ’cause his ould mare—’

But we had no thought for anything but the disaster that had befallen us, and all that was now imminent. With Tom Clemmer, the one hope of Windlecombe, out of the fight, what might happen to the rest? With bated breath we watched for the third ball. Young Daniel drove it over the bowler’s head, and with a trembling pencil I put down two to his name. Playing with desperate care, he added two more before the end of the over, and we began to pluck up heart again. Young Tom came and stood behind me. His big thumb travelled down the list of names on the scoring-book.

‘’Tis not lost yet!’ he said with reviving cheerfulness. ‘Dan’l may do well, wanst ’a gets set. An’ belike Mr. Weaverly ’ull bide out a bit. Then there be Huggins wi’ his luck; an’ who knaws but what the boys ’ull account fer a dozen or so atween ’em?’

I had now time, as the fielders were accommodating themselves to the left-handed batting of the curate, to glance down the list. The last name came upon me as an utter surprise.

‘What? Never old Stallwood! Why, he must be seventy, if he’s a—’

‘Ay! Cap’n Stall’ard sure enow! ’Tis a joke, more ’n anything. But ne’er another livin’ sowl there wur, as cud— Oh, Jupitty! Mr. Weaverly’s hout leg-afore!’

But it was not Mr. Weaverly’s leg. With a white face, his body bent to the shape of an inverted letter L, and both arms clasped about his middle, the curate came tip-toeing back to the tent. He sat down silently in a corner. Huggins—a lean, red-whiskered giant in moleskins—burst out into the sunshine and made for the wicket, waving his bat like a war-club and murmuring imprecations as he went.

‘Now ’tis jest touch-an’-go,’ said young Tom in my ear. ‘If ’a hits ’em, they’ll travel, you mark me! ’Twill be eether th’ river, th’ town, or Windle Hill.’

Huggins stood at the wicket, legs wide apart, and bat held high over his head. The bowling now was swift, stealthy, underhand. The ball sped down the pitch, never leaving the grass for an inch. A crack rang out in the dazzling July sunshine. Daniel Dray started to run, but the batsman waved him back. Huggins stood watching the skied ball until it came to ground in the next field. He laughed uproariously.

‘What d’ye think o’ ee?’

It was another four, and that made eleven in all. Huggins swung up his bat, and spread his great hob-nailed boots for a still mightier effort. The ball hissed down the pitch. Huggins caught it as it hopped from a tussock. Like a lark it soared up into the blue, and we heard a clear musical plunk as it dropped into the river. A roar of delight burst from the crowd.

‘Lost ball!’ shouted Tom behind me. ‘Hooroar! Seventeen!’

Huggins spat upon his hands, took a reef in his leather belt, and lifted his bat again. The little underhand bowler came crouching up to the crease, and launched the new ball almost from his knees. Wide and wild it flew this time. But there was a sound of crashing timber; Huggins’s wicket scattered into space, stumps and bails whirling together half-way up the pitch. He had hit the wrong thing.

‘An’ now,’ wailed poor Tom Clemmer, ‘’tis as good as finished. Dan’l wunt ha’ no chaance. Jest as well declare, an’ ha’ done wi’ it. Th’ boys?—they’ll be all done in a hover, an’—’

‘Well, an’ what about th’ Cap’n, Tom?’

It was the voice of the Captain himself, and we all turned to look. He was leaning comfortably against the tent pole, the very picture of an old, superannuated forecastle-hand. He wore his usual vast faded blue suit. A seaman’s cap with hard shiny peak gripped his bald head from the rear. His red face swam in joviality and perspiration. Tom regarded him with mingled respect and doubt.

‘Ye caan’t run, Maast’ Stall’ard.’

‘Trew, Tom!’

‘An’ ye ha’ant touched a crickut bat fer thirty year.’

‘Trew agen,’ returned the Captain serenely.

‘Ha, hum! well! a good plucked-un ye be, anyways. Now then, Dickie!’

The first small boy set forth over the sunny stretch of grass that lay between the tent and the waiting team. Very small and insignificant he looked in his school-corduroys, and leg-pads that reached well-nigh up to his waist. His advent was greeted with ribaldry from all parts of the field. We heard Daniel Dray admonishing the boy as he came smiling up to the pitch.

‘Now, Dickie, doan’t ye dare run ’til I shouts to ye, an’ then run as if He wur after ye. Hould your bat straight, ye young varmint! Now then, look hout! There! what did I tell ye?’

Dickie’s wicket was down, and Dickie himself was running back to the tent vastly relieved.

‘Out wi’ ye, Georgie Huggins! An’ do as well as your faather!’ cried Tom Clemmer encouragingly. ‘’Tis hover, an’ Dan’l’s got th’ play now. Oh, Dan’l, Dan’l! if only ’twur you an’ me!’

But, playing with the ingenuity as well as the courage of despair, young Daniel Dray now began to show his true mettle. Odd runs he refused, taking only even numbers, so that each time the bowling fell to his lot again. At the end of the over, he stole a desperate single with the same object in view. He reached home safe enough, but Georgie was run out. Boy Number Two had been disposed of at the cost of a gallant six.

Following the same tactics, young Daniel eked out the remaining three boys with still more crafty skill. When at length old Stallwood, the last man, launched out into the sunlight to show the town what he remembered of cricket, the score had risen to forty-nine, and our spirits with it. We cheered him lustily as he went.

‘Wan more,’ quoth Tom Clemmer, ‘jest wan, an’ I’ll light me pipe. There be allers a chaance wi’ fifty. Lorsh! Look at th’ Cap’n!’

Three times on his way to the pitch he had stopped, turned, and waved his cap in acknowledgment of the ovation given him. And now he was greeting the Stavishamites each by name, and shaking hands with the wicket-keeper. He got to the crease at last and grounded his bat. The next moment the whole field had left their places and run for the tent, leaving the Captain standing alone and amazed at his wicket.

‘’A doan’t knaw ’a be hout,’ said Tom. ‘D’ ye onnerstand? ’A never heerd th’ bawler shout, an’ never seed th’ ball acomin’. Belike ’a thinks they be all gone fer a drink, to hearten ’em at the sight o’ sech a crickutter!’

And being free for a time, I took upon myself the task of walking out to the Captain, and breaking the news to him as gently as I could.

It was now Windlecombe’s turn to take the field, and Tom Clemmer led out his team with a good heart, in spite of its tail of juveniles. Daniel Dray and the Rev. Mr. Weaverly were our first, indeed our only bowlers. One of the first batsmen for Stavisham was Daniel’s ancient foe, the grocer; and we watched the beginning of play with breathless interest, for we knew Daniel would aim to kill. He grubbed savagely in the sawdust, then sent the first ball hurtling down the pitch.

The old men were still upon the benches outside, and in that quarter sympathy with Windlecombe was as staunch as ever. But in the scoring tent I sat amidst enemies now. The townsmen crowded behind me, a humorously sarcastic crew.

‘Fifty to beat? My ould Aunt Mary! D’ ye reckon we’ll do it, Bill?’

‘Dunno. ’Tis ser’ous fer Stavisham. Only eleven on us, there be. Likely March wunt do ’t off his own bat—no, not ’arf!’‘That there tinker-cove’s agoin’ to bowl fust. There ’ee goos! Wot a —’

The rest was drowned in a thunderclap of shouting. There was a general stampede among the spectators. For the grocer had driven Daniel’s first ball clean into the tent.

It was a bad beginning for Windlecombe, and bad rapidly changed to worse. Young Daniel bowled steadily and coolly for the first over, in spite of continuous punishment; but thereafter he lost first his temper, and then his head. The smiling grocer played him to all points of the compass; and the more the grocer smiled, the more wildly erratic Daniel’s bowling grew. As for the Rev. Mr. Weaverly, he could do no more than send meek, ingenuous balls trundling diffidently up the pitch; and he was skied with heartrending regularity. The batsmen kept continually running. The little tent seemed to belly out on all sides with the cheering, as a sail with wind.

‘Thirty up!’

‘Thirty fer nauthin’!’

‘Thirty-one! And another’! Thirty-two! Garn, March! Wot a wazegoose! Thirty—’

‘Five! ’Ooray!’

The shout went off in my ear like a punt gun. And then there fell a sudden silence about me, as all strained eyes and ears out to the field. Some altercation was going on, but not between members of the opposing sides. ‘Drop ut, ye ould fule!’ I heard Tom Clemmer roar; and, peering over the crowd, I saw Captain Stallwood, ball in hand, walking up to the pitch. He rolled up his sleeves as he came.

‘Drop ut, I tell ye!’ cried Tom once more, ‘’tis crickut we be playin’, not maarbles, man! Gimme that ball, Stall’ard, or I’ll— Lorsh! what be come to th’ ould—’

The rest was a confused wrangle amongst the whole team. Presently, to our amazement, we saw all drift back to their posts, and old Stallwood take his place triumphantly at the bowling-crease. In the dead quiet that followed, I heard the grocer chuckle richly, as he got ready to smite the Captain all over the field.

The old man stood stock still on the crease, eyeing the batsman solemnly, the ball held low down between his knees. So long he remained in this posture, that at length impatient exclamations began to break out on all sides.

‘Well! now ye ha’ got un, Stall’ard, let ’n goo, mate!’

‘’Tain’t i’ church ye be, Cap’n. ’Tis crickut!’

‘Bawl up, gaffer! We warnts to get hoame afore daark!’

And from the grocer, leaning with exaggerated weariness on his bat:‘Doan’t ye be i’ no sorter hurry, ould bluebottle! But when y’ are ready, just send us a postcard, will ye?’

The Captain’s hand went slowly up, the ball held curiously against his wrist. He launched it with a sudden sidelong twist. As it rose high into the air, I could see that it went wide and off, even from my position in the tent. With a laugh the batsman strode out half a dozen yards to meet it. A moment later he was gazing back aghast at his splayed wicket. The Captain’s rich husky voice pealed out above the din:

‘There be a poun’ o’ butter fer ’ee!’

And now we were the frantic spectators of a drama that gained in thrilling interest with every moment. The new batsman arrived at the wicket, and again old Stallwood sent the ball sailing down the pitch, wide as ever, but this time to leg. I watched it more carefully now. Though it made a high curve, it rose not a hair’s-breadth after touching ground, but shot straight in. Again we saw the glint of a falling bail behind the wicket. The Captain thrust both bare arms deep in his trousers-flap, and silently grinned. The third man did little better. He succeeded in blocking a couple of the balls; but the next, more crooked than any, sent him dumbfounded back to the tent.

There was no more ribaldry about me now. The fourth batsman sallied out amidst a rustle of whispered apprehension and hard-drawn breaths, and returned almost immediately to the same tense atmosphere. Outside on the benches, the old men were rocking on their seats with delight, like trees in a wind. Bleak, the cobbler, was careering up and down, beside himself with joy.

‘Fower in a hover!’ he shouted. ‘I reckons I knaws summat about leather, but I ne’er seed it do the like o’ that! ’Tain’t bawlin’, I tell ye: ’tis magic!’

And now young Daniel Dray was bowling again, and bowling with renewed courage and skill. All his old command of length and break had returned to him. By the end of his over, another wicket had fallen, and the score had risen no higher than forty-three. The Captain took the ball once more, this time without any opposition. At once the fearsome whispering in the tent grew still. Almost we forgot to breathe, as the great dark hairy fist came slowly up into the sunlight.

But the Captain had changed his tactics. Instead of the leisurely, high-curving delivery with which he had done such execution hitherto, the ball left his hand straight and low and as quick as light. It pitched no more than an inch or two in front of the waiting bat, then struck vertically upward. A crack resounded through the field. The batsman staggered—clapped a hand to his head. A moment more and he was picking an uneven course towards the tent, thoroughly satiated with the Captain’s magic.

Very slowly the next man set out for the pitch. He stopped on the way to tighten a strap of his leg-guard, and again unconscionably long to adjust his batting-glove. Once he turned back a tallowy face, and seemed to be in two minds about something. But at length he got to the wicket and grounded his bat. The long arm uprose again, and the ball sped. It proved to be the last bowled that day. For once more that terrible upward break ended with a thud and a yell, echoed from nine panic-stricken men about me. The luckless batsman fled with as gory a visage as his companion had done, and none would take his place, though the grocer charmed and stormed never so wisely. Windlecombe had won by six.

Later by an hour the victorious eleven gathered in the parlour of the Three Thatchers Inn, old Stallwood grimly smiling in their midst. Tom Clemmer shook his fist at him, delight in his eyes.

‘But ’twarn’t crickut, Stall’ard!’ he said reproachfully.

‘Noa,’ returned the old man, ‘not crickut, leastways not all on’t. That there sing-chin-summat or other—Red Hot Ball, I calls un—that wur a trick as I larned in Chaney.’

III

How fast time flies you can never truly estimate until you go step and step with it through the summer woods and fields. In a sense, town-life—where there is so much of permanence in environment—puts a drag on time, and not seldom pulls it up altogether. Moreover, in towns time is estimated by events, by experiences. You hear a great musician, see a great play, look on at some magnificent pageant, or are shocked by some catastrophe; and straightway there is half a lifetime of emotion thrust between two strokes of the clock. By so much in very truth your life has been lengthened; for it is the intensity of living that counts in the civic tale of years. If you find an old man not only declaring that he has lived long, but believing it, it is a great chance but he tells you so in the close-clipped cockney tongue of the town.

And yet it is better to live in some far-away country nook like Windlecombe, and be reminded with every gliding summer hour that time flies and life is short, if only because of the undoubted fact that such a frame of mind carries a belief in eternal youth as a necessary implication. Between life’s dawn and the dusk of its western sky, there is literally no time to grow old in a natural, aboriginal environment. So inextricably interwoven are the threads of human existence and that of the green world round about, that the annual rejuvenation of the one infallibly communicates itself to the other. With every spring we start life afresh. Though we may live to threescore years and ten, we are children still; and come upon death at last like an unexpected gust at a corner, old age unrealised to the very end.

In the weeks that are closing now, I have heard and seen more of the galloping hoofs of this swift, high-stepping jade, summer, than is good for entire peace of mind. Years ago I made a vow that I would never again eke out the fleeting golden days, like a miser to whom spending is not pleasure but only pain. I vowed that I would always squander time at this season; let it drift by unthinkingly; get my fill of sunshine, and fill and fill again to my heart’s content; yet do it as a strayed heifer in the corn, wantoning over an acre to each mouthful. But this time, as ever, the good resolution has been forgotten. The old parsimony has dogged the way at every step. I must be up with the sun in the small hours of each morning, fearful of losing a single beam from the millions. To waste in sleep the blue, spangled summer nights, when all the country-side is resonant of life and fragrant with the scent that comes only with the darkness, has seemed like sacrilege. Yet, for all my industry, July is nearing its end, and I know that I have drunk but a drop or two out of its vast ocean. And already I have renewed the old vow, to be disregarded as ever, doubtless, when July again comes round.

On all the high-lying corn lands now, harvest has begun; and the fields in the valley are fast taking on that deep tinge of gipsy-gold which is the sign of full maturity. Scarce had the shrill note of the mowing-machine stilled in the meadows, when the deeper voice of the reaper-and-binder began on the hill. All day long I sat in this cool quiet nook of a study, and the steady jarring sound came over to me from the hillside, filling the little room. I saw the machine with its pair of grey horses, waiting at the field-gate, while the scythe-men cut a way for it into the amber wall of the grain. Steadily hour after hour it worked round the field, until at last, looking forth towards noon, I saw that only a small triangular piece remained uncut in the middle of the field.

Now there were a score or so of the farm folk waiting hard by, each armed with a cudgel; and with them seemingly every dog in the village. As the machine went round, every time making the patch of standing corn smaller, I could see rabbits bolting in all directions from the diminishing cover; and there uprose continually a hubbub of voices from dogs and men. Towards the end, the stubble became alive with the little dark scurrying forms, fleeing to the surrounding fields, the most of them escaping harmlessly for want of pursuers. But even then, as I afterwards learned, some eight or nine dozen were killed.

I have always kept away from these harvest battues, as indeed from all scenes of sport and congregations of sportsmen. I am willing enough to profit by these activities, and receive and enjoy my full share of the furred and feathered spoil admittedly without one humanitarian qualm. But this much confessed, I would gladly welcome the day when everywhere, save in the rabbit warrens, the sound of the sporting gun should cease throughout this southern land. Rabbits must be kept down to the end of time; but, for the creatures that require preservation, too great a price is paid, and paid by the wrong class. It is not the owner of game-preserves who bears the main cost of his thunderous pleasuring. It is the lover of wild life, who sees the hawks and owls and small deer of the woodlands growing scarcer with every year; and the children who, in the springtime, are cheated out of their right to wander through the primrose glades.

To many this may seem a wearisomely trite point of view, affecting a grievance as old as the hills, and even less likely of obliteration. But though the point of view is ancient enough, the grievance is no longer so. Of late years the ranks of village dwellers have been very largely reinforced from the classes who care little for sport and a great deal for all other allurements of the country-side. Rural England is no longer peopled by sportsmen and the dependents of sportsmen; but, slowly and surely, a majority is creeping up in the villages, composed of men and women both knowing and loving Nature, and to whom the old-time local policy of endurance under deprivation of rights for expediency’s sake, is an incomprehensible, as well as an intolerable thing. All the vast-winged, beautiful marauders of the air that I love to watch, are ruthlessly shot down by the gamekeepers on a suspicion presumptive and unproved; but the fox that, in a single night, massacres every bird in the villager’s hen-roost, must go scatheless because poor profit may not be set before rich pastime.

One day, almost the hottest so far, I was out in the meadows, and came upon a curious thing. The path, or rather green lane, ran between high hedges. On either hand there was a great field of flowering crops, the one red clover, the other sainfoin. There must have been twenty or thirty acres of each stretching away under the tense still air and light, much of a colour, but the sainfoin of a softer, purer pink. Both fields seemed alike attractive to the bees; but while, to the right, the sainfoin gave out a mighty note of organ music, the red clover on my left was utterly silent. Looking through a gap in the foliage, I could not see there a single butterfly or bee. The truth, of course, was that the nectar in the trumpet-petals of the clover was too far down for the honey-bee to reach; nor would even the bumble-bees trouble about it, with a whole province of sainfoin hard by, over-brimming with choicer, more attainable sweets.

As I wandered along, between these great zones of sound and silence, the air seemed to grow hotter and more oppressive with every moment. There was something uncanny in the stillness of all around me. The green sprays in the tops of the highest elms lay against the blue sky sharp and clear, as though enamelled upon it. Not a bird sang in the woodland. Save for the deep throbbing melody from the sainfoin, all the world lay dumb and stupefied under the noontide glare. And then, chancing to turn and look southward, I saw the cause of it. A storm was coming up. Close down on the horizon lay a bank of cloud like a solid billow of ink. It was driving up at incredible speed. Though not a leaf or grass blade stirred around me, the cloud seemed tossed and torn in a whirlwind’s grip. Every moment it lifted higher towards the sun, changing its shape incessantly, black fold upon fold rolling together, colliding, giving place to others blacker still. And flying in advance of all this, borne by a still swifter air-current, were long sombre streamers of cloud rent into every conceivable shape of torn and tattered rags.

And now, as the dense cloud-pack got up, the brilliant light was blotted out at a stroke, and this startling thing happened. Every bee, apparently, at work in the vast field of sainfoin, spread her wings at the ominous signal, and raced for home. They swept over my head in numbers that literally darkened the sky. Again, literally, the sound of their going was like a continuous deep syren-note, striking point-blank in the ear. For a minute at most it endured, and then died away almost as suddenly as it came. A bleak ghostly light paled on everything around me. Little cat’s paws of wind flung through the torpid air. Afar the harsh voice of the oncoming tempest sounded. Slow hot gouts of water began to fall, and every moment the inky pall of cloud lit up with an internal fire.At first, as I made off homeward in the track of the vanished bee-army, I tried to emulate their speed. But the torrent came surging and crying up in my rear, and in a dozen yards I was waterlogged. Thereafter, going leisurely, I came at last into the village, and so to the house. And here, in spite of the deluge, I must stop and look on at more wonders. It seemed almost impossible for any bird to sustain itself on wings under such a cataract. But there above me the martins were at their old incessant gambols, circling and darting about, hither and thither, high and low, in a whirling madcap crew; and higher still, right in the throat of the tempest, I could make out the swifts, hundreds strong, weaving their old mazy pattern on the sky, as though in the pearl and opal dusk of a summer’s evening.