The road mounts the low Downs again. The boundless stubble is streaked by long bands of purple-brown, the work of seven ploughs to which the teams and their carters, riding or walking, are now slowly descending by different ways over the slopes and jingling in the rain. Above is a Druid moor bounded by beech-clumps, and crossed by old sunken ways and broad grassy tracks. It is a land of moles and sheep. At the end of a shattered line of firs a shepherd leans, bunched under his cape of sacking, to watch his black-faced flock dull-tinkling in the short furze and among the tumuli under the constant white rain. Those old roads, being over hilly and open land, are as they were before the making of modern roads, and little changed from what they were before the Roman. But it is a pity to see some of the old roads that have been left to the sole protection of the little gods. One man is stronger than they, as may be known by any one who has seen the bones, crockery, tin and paper thrown by Shere and Cocking into the old roads near by as into a dust-bin; or seen the gashes in the young trees planted down Gorst Road, Wandsworth Common; or the saucy “Private” at the entrance to a lane worn by a hundred generations through the sand a little north of Petersfield; or the barbed wire fastened into the living trees alongside the footpath over a neighbouring hill that has lately been sold. What is the value of every one’s right to use a footpath if a single anti-social exclusive landowning citizen has the right to make it intolerable except to such as consider it a place only for the soles of the feet? The builder of a house acquires the right to admit the sunlight through his window. Cannot the users of a footpath acquire a right, during the course of half-a-dozen dynasties or less, to the sight of the trees and the sky which that footpath gives them in its own separate way? At least I hope that footpaths will soon cease to be defined as a line—length without breadth—connecting one point with another. In days when they are used as much for the sake of the scenes historic or beautiful through which they pass as of the villages or houses on this hand or that, something more than the mere right to tread upon a certain ribbon of grass or mud will have to be preserved if the preservation is to be of much use, and the right of way must become the right of view and of very ancient lights as well. By enforcing these rights some of the mountains of the land might even yet be saved, as Mr. Henry S. Salt wishes to save them.[6] In the meantime it is to be hoped that his criticisms will not be ignored by the tourists who leave the Needle Gully a cascade of luncheon wrappings and the like; for it is not from a body of men capable of such manners that a really effective appeal against the sacrifice of “our mountains” to commercial and other selfishness is like to spring.

And those lone wayside greens, no man’s gardens, measuring a few feet wide but many miles in length—why should they be used either as receptacles for the dust of motor-cars or as additions to the property of the landowner who happens to be renewing his fence? They used to be as beautiful and cool and fresh as rivers, these green sisters of the white roads—illuminated borders of many a weary tale. But now, lest there should be no room for the dust, they are turning away from them the gypsies who used to camp there for a night. The indolent District Council that is anxious to get rid of its difficulties—for the moment—at the expense of a neighbouring district—it cares not—will send out its policemen to drive away the weary horses and sleeping children from the acre of common land which had hitherto been sacred—to what?—to an altar, a statue, a fountain, a seat?—No! to a stately notice-board; half-a-century ago the common of which this is a useless patch passed on easy terms to the pheasant lords. The gypsies have to go. Give them a pitch for the night and you are regarded as an enemy of the community or perhaps even as a Socialist. The gypsies shall be driven from parish to parish, and finally settle down as squalid degenerate nomads in a town where they lose what beauty and courage they had, in adding to the difficulties of another council. Yet if they were in a cage or a compound which it cost money to see, hundreds would pay for a stare at their brown faces and bright eyes, their hooped tents, their horses, their carelessness of the crowd, and in a few years an imitation of these things will be applauded in a “pageant” of the town which has destroyed the reality.

The grassy way ends with the moor at a pool beside a road, on one side of it six thatched cottages fenced by sycamore and ash and elm, on the other a grey farm and immense brown barn, within a long wall roofed with mossy thatch; and the swallows fly low and slowly about the trees.

First beeches line the rising and descending road—past a church whose ivied tombstones commemorate men of Cornish name—as far as an inn and a sycamore nobly balanced upon a pedestal of matted roots. Then there are ash-trees on either side and ricks of straw wetted to an orange hue, and beyond them the open cornland, and rising out of it an all-day-long procession in the south, the great company of the Downs again, some tipped with wood, some bare; in the north, a broken chain of woods upon low but undulating land seem the vertebrÆ of a forest of old time stretching from east to west like the Downs. Hither and thither the drunken pewits cry over the furrows, and thousands of rocks and daws wheel over the stubble. As the day grows old it grows sweet and golden and the rain ceases, and the beauty of the Downs in the humid clearness does not long allow the eyes to wander away from them. At first, when the sun breaks through, all silver bright and acclaimed by miles of clouds in his own livery, the Downs below are violet, and have no form except where they carve the sky with their long arches. It is the woods northward that are chiefly glorified by the light and warmth, and the glades penetrating them and the shining stubble and the hedges, and the flying wood-pigeons and the cows of richest brown and milky white; the road also gleams blue and wet. But as the sun descends the light falls on the Downs out of a bright cave in the gloomy forest of sky, and their flanks are olive and their outlines intensely clear. From one summit to another runs a string of trees like cavalry connecting one beech clump with another, so that they seem actually to be moving and adding themselves to the clumps. Above all is the abstract beauty of pure line—coupled with the beauty of the serene and the uninhabited and remote—that holds the eye until at length the hills are humbled and dispread as part of the ceremony of sunset in a tranquil, ensanguined, quietly travelling sky. The blue swallows go slowly along the silent road beside me, and the last rays bless a grooved common grazed upon by cows and surrounded by ranges of low white buildings and a row of lichened grotesque limes, dark of bole, golden-leaved, where children are playing and an anvil rings.

Frost follows after the blue silence and chill of twilight, and the dawn is dimmest violet in a haze that reveals the candied grass, the soaking blue dark elms painted yellow only in one place, the red roofs, all in a world of the unborn, and the waters steaming around invisible crying coots. Gradually round white clouds—so dim that the sky seems but to dream of round white clouds—appear imbedded in the haze; the beams grow hot, and a breeze joins with them in sucking and scattering all the sweet of the first fallen leaves, the weed fires and the late honeysuckle.

Why are there no swifts to race and scream? We fret over these stages of the descending year; we dream on such a day as this that there is no need of farther descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping; we have lost them; but we recall them now when the steam-plough has furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long for the day when the gentle north wind can only just stir the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the branches are motionless. The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over the white cool roads. The wood-pigeon’s is the sole voice in the oak woods of the low hills, except that once or twice a swift screams as he pursues that martial flight of his—as of one who swings a sword as he goes—towards the beeches and hop gardens of the higher hills in the north; it is perhaps the last day for more than eight months that his cry will be heard. A few barley-straws hang from the hazels; some leaves are yellow. Autumn, in fact, seems possible to the mind that is not perfectly content with these calm sweet airs and the sense of the fulness of things.

At a crossing a small island is made amidst this and three other roads, and on the island stands an oast house with two mellow cones and white leaning cowls; and beside it a simple tiled cart-lodge, dimly displaying massive wheels, curving bulwarks of waggons and straight shafts behind its doorless pillars of rough-hewn wood. Making one group with these, though separated from them by one road, is an old red farmhouse, of barely distinguishable timber and brick, with white-edged dormers and lower windows and doors, entrenched behind hollyhocks of deepest red and the burning discs of everlasting sunflowers. Behind the gates stand four haystacks brightly thatched, and one that is dark and old and carved into huge stairs.

Notice the gate into the rickyard. It is of the usual five oak bars; and across these is a diagonal bar from the lowest end nearest the hinge to the upper end of the opposite side, and from top to bottom a perpendicular cross-bar divides the gate. The top bar marks it as no common gate made at a factory with a hundred others of the same kind, though there are scores of them in Kent. It thickens gradually towards the hinge end of the gate, and then much more decidedly so that it resembles a gun-barrel and stock; and just where the stock begins it is carved with something like a trigger-guard; the whole being well proportioned, graceful but strong. In all the best gates of Kent, Sussex and Surrey and the South Country there is an approach to this form, usually without the trigger-guard, but sometimes having instead a much more elaborate variation of it which takes away from the dignity and simplicity of the gate. At the road’s edge crooked quince-trees lean over a green pond and green but nearly yellow straight reeds; and four cart-horses, three sorrels and a grey, are grouped under one stately walnut.

These things mingle their power with that of the silence and the wooded distance under the blue and rosy west. The slow dying of a train’s roar beats upon the shores of the silence and the distance, and is swallowed up in them like foam in sand, and adds one more trophy to the glory of the twilight.

Night passes, and the white dawn is poured out over the dew from the folds in low clouds of infinitely modulated grey. Autumn is clearly hiding somewhere in the long warm alleys under the green and gold of the hops. The very colours of the oast houses seem to wait for certain harmonies with oaks in the meadows and beeches in the steep woods. The songs, too, are those of the drowsy yellow-hammer, of the robin moodily brooding in orchards yellow spotted and streaked, of the unseen wandering willow-wren singing sweetly but in a broken voice of a matter now forgotten, of the melancholy twit of the single bullfinch as he flies. The sudden lyric of the wren can stir no corresponding energy in the land which is bowed, still, comfortable, like a deep-uddered cow fastened to the milking-stall and munching grains. Soon will the milk and honey flow. The reaping-machine whirrs; the wheelwrights have mended the waggons’ wheels and patched their sides; they stand outside their lodges.

There is a quarter of a sloping wheat-field reaped; the shocks stand out above the silvery stubble in the evening like rocks out of a moonlight sea. The unreaped corn is like a tawny coast; and all is calm, with the quiet of evening heavens fallen over the earth. This beauty of the ripe Demeter standing in the August land is incomparable. It reminds one of the poet who said that he had seen a maid who looked like a fountain on a green lawn when the south wind blows in June; and one whose smile was as memorable as the new moon in the first still mild evening of the year, when it is seen for a moment only over the dark hills; and one whose walking was more kindling to the blood than good ale by a winter fire on an endless evening among friends; but that now he has met another, and when he is with her or thinks of her he becomes as one that is blind and deaf to all other things.

But a few days and the bryony leaves are palest yellow in the hedge. Rooks are innumerable about the land, but their cawing, like all other sounds, like all the early bronze and rose and gold of the leaves, is muffled by the mist which endures right through the afternoon; and all day falls the gentle rain. In the hillside hop garden two long lines of women and children, red and white and black, are destroying the golden green of the hops, and they are like two caterpillars destroying a leaf. Pleasant it is now to see the white smoke from the oast house pouring solidly like curving plumes into the still rain, and to smell the smell, bitter and never to be too much sniffed and enjoyed, that travels wide over the fields. For the hop drier has lit his two fires of Welsh coal and brimstone and charcoal under the two cones of the oast house, and has spread his couch of straw on the floor where he can sleep his many little sleeps in the busy day and night. The oast house consists of the pair of cones, white-vaned and tiled, upon their two circular chambers in which the fires are lit. Attached to these on one side is a brick building of two large rooms, one upon the ground, where the hop drier sleeps and tends his fires, lighted only by doors at either side and divided by the wooden pillars which support the floor of the upper room. This, the oast chamber, reached by a ladder, is a beautiful room, its oak boards polished by careful use and now stained faintly by the green-gold of hops, its roof raftered and high and dim. Light falls upon it on one side from two low windows, on the opposite side from a door through which the hops arrive from the garden. The waggon waits below the door, full of the loose, stained hop-sacks which the carter and his boy lift up to the drier. From the floor two short ladders lead to the doors in the cones where the hops are suspended on canvas floors above the kilns. The inside of the cone is full of coiling fumes which have killed the young swallows in the nests under the cowl—the parents return again and again, but dare no longer alight on their old perches on the vanes. When dried the hops are poured out on the floor of the vast chamber in a lisping scaly pile, and the drier is continually sweeping back those which are scattered. Through a hole in the floor he forces them down into a sack reaching to the floor of the room below. He is hard at work making these sacks or “pokes,” which, when full and their necks stitched up, are as hard as wood. Before the drying is over the full sacks will take up half the room. The children tired of picking come to admire and to visit all the corners of the room; of the granary alongside and its old sheepbells, its traps, a crossbow and the like; of the farmyard and barns, sacred except at this time. For a few minutes the sun is visible as a shapeless crimson thing above the mist and behind the elms. It is twilight; the wheels and hoofs of the last waggon approach and arrive and die away. And so day after day the fires glow with ruby and sapphire and emerald; the cone wears its plume of smoke; and everything is yellow-green—the very scent of the drying hops can hardly be otherwise described, in its mixture of sharpness and mellowness. Then when the last sack is pressed benches are placed round the chamber and a table at one end. The master, who is giving up the farm, leans on the table and pays each picker and pole-puller and measurer, with a special word for each and a jest for the women. Ale and gin and cakes are brought in, and the farmer leaves the women and one or two older men to eat and drink. The women in their shabby black skirts and whitish blouses shuffle through a dance or two, all modern and some American. One old man tipsily tottering recalls the olden time with a step-dance down the room; some laugh at him, others turn up their new roseate noses. Next year the hops are to be grubbed up; the old man to be turned out of his cottage—for he has paid no rent these seven years; but now it is cakes and ale, and the farmer has hiccupped a lying promise that his successor will go on growing hops.

HAMPSHIRE.

To-day is fair day. The scene is a green, slightly undulating common, grassy and rushy at its lower end where a large pond wets the margin of the high road, and at the upper end sprinkled with the dwarf and the common gorse out of which rise many tumuli, green or furzy mounds of earth, often surmounted by a few funereal pines. The common is small; it is bounded on every side by roads, and on one by a row of new mean houses; there is a golf-house among the tumuli; in one place a large square has been ploughed and fenced by a private owner. But the slope of the sandy soil is pleasant; in one place it is broken into a low cliff overhanging the water, and this with the presence of the gorse give it a touch of the wildness by which it may still deserve its name of “heath.” Most powerful of all in their effect upon the place are the tumuli. They are low and smooth; one or two scarcely heave the turf; some have been removed; and there is no legend attached to them. Yet their presence gives an indescribable charm and state, and melancholy too, and makes these few acres an expanse unequalled by any other of the same size. Not too far off to be said to belong to the heath, from which they are separated by three miles of cultivated land and a lesser beechen hill, are the Downs; among them one that bears a thin white road winding up at the edge of a dark wood. In the moist October air the Downs are very grave and gentle and near, and are not lost to sight until far beyond the turreted promontory of Chanctonbury.

Early in the morning the beggars begin to arrive, the lame and the blind, with or without a musical instrument. King of them all certainly is he with no legs at all and seeming not to need them, so active is he on a four-wheeled plank which suspends him only a foot above the ground. Many a strong man earns less money. The children envy him as he moves along, a wheeled animal, weather-beaten, white-haired, white-bearded, with neat black hat and white slop, a living toy, but with a deep voice, a concertina and a tin full of pence and halfpence.

These unashamed curiosities line the chief approaches, down which every one is going to the fair except a few shabby fellows who offer blue sheets full of music-hall ballads to the multitude and, with a whisper, indecent songs to the select. Another not less energetic, but stout and condescending, yellow-bearded, in a high hard felt hat, gives away tracts. The sound of a hymn from one organ mingles with the sound of “Put me among the girls” from another and the rattle of the legless man’s offertory-tin.

The main part of the fair consists of a double row, a grove, of tents and booths, roundabouts, caravans, traps and tethered ponies. A crowd of dark-clad women goes up and down between the rows: there is a sound of machine-made music, of firing at targets, of shouts and neighs and brays and the hoot of engines. Here at the entrance to the grove is a group of yellow vans; some children playing among the shafts and wheels and musing horses; and a gypsy woman on a stool, her head on one side, combing her black hair and talking to the children, while a puppy catches at the end of her tresses when they come swishing down. Beyond are cocoanut-shies, short-sighted cyclists performing, Aunt Sallies, rows of goldfish bowls into which a light ball has to be pitched to earn a prize, stalls full of toys, cheap jewellery and sweets like bedded-out plants, and stout women pattering alongside—bold women, with sleek black or yellow hair and the bearing and countenance of women who have to make their way in the world. Behind these, women are finishing their toilet and their children’s among the vans, preparing meals over red crackling fires, and the horses rest their noses on the stalls and watch the crowd; the long yellow dogs are curled up among the wheels or nosing in the crowd.

There are men selling purses containing a sovereign for sixpence, loud, fat cosmopolitans on a cockney basis with a ceaseless flow of cajolery intermingled with sly indecency; the country policeman in the background puzzling over his duty in the matter, but in the end paralyzed by the showmen’s gift of words. One man has before him a counter on which he asks you to cover a red-painted disc with five smaller discs of zinc, charging twopence for the attempt and promising a watch to the great man who succeeds. After a batch of failures he himself, with good-natured but bored face, shows how easily it is done, and raising his eyes in despair craves for more courage from the audience. The crowd looks on, hesitating, until he singles out the most bashful countryman at the back of the throng, saying: “I like your face. You are a good sort. You have a cheerful face; it’s the rich have the sad faces. So I’ll treat you to a go.” The hero steps forward and succeeds, but as it was a free trial he receives no watch; trying again for twopence he fails. Another tries: “By Jove! that was a near one.” A woman tries, and just as she is finishing, “You’re a ’cute one, missus,” he ejaculates, and she fails. Another tries, and the showman has a watch ready to hand over, and only at the last moment says excitedly (restoring the watch quietly to its place): “I thought you’d got it that time.... Come along! It’s the best game in the world.” Once more he repeats the trick himself without looking, and then exclaims as he sweeps the discs together: “It’s a silly game, I call it!” He is like the preachers who show the stupid world how virtue is won: he has a large audience, a large paunch, and many go away disappointed. The crowd stares, and has the one deep satisfaction of believing that the woman who travels with him is not his wife.

At the upper end of the grove is the gaudy green and gold and scarlet-painted and embossed entrance to the bioscope, raised a few feet above the crowd. On the platform before the door stand two painted men and a girl. The girl has a large nose, loose mouth and a ready, but uneasy, discontented smile as if she knows that her paint is an imperfect refuge from the gaze of the crowd; as if she knows that her eyes are badly darkened, and her white stockings soiled, and her legs too thin under her short skirt, and her yellow hair too stiff. She lounges wearily with a glib clown who wears a bristly fringe of sandy hair round his face, which tickles her and causes roars of laughter when he aims at a kiss. The other performer is a contortionist, a small slender man in dirty, ill-fitting scarlet jacket with many small brass buttons, dirty brown trousers criss-crossed by yellow stripes; his hands in his pockets; his snub nose deep pink, and his lean face made yet leaner and more dismal by a thin streak of red paint on either cheek. His melancholy seems natural, yet adds to his vulgarity because he forsakes it so quickly when he smirks and turns away if the girl exposes her legs too much. For she turns a somersault with the clown at intervals; or doubles herself back to touch the ground first with her yellow hair and at last with her head; or is lifted up by the clown and, supported on the palm of one of his hands, hangs dangling in a limp bow, her face yet gaunter and sadder upside down with senseless eyes and helpless legs. The crowd watch—looking sideways at one another to get their cue—some with unconscious smiles entranced, but most of them grimly controlling the emotions roused by the girl or the contortionist or the clown and the thought of their unstable life. A few squirt water languidly or toss confetti. Others look from time to time to see whether any one in the county dare in broad daylight enter the booth for “gentlemen only,” at the door of which stands a shabby gaudy woman of forty-five grinning contemptuously.

Up and down moves the crowd—stiffly dressed children carrying gay toys or bowls of goldfish or cocoanuts—gypsy children with scarves, blue or green or red—lean, tanned, rough-necked labourers caged in their best clothes, except one, a labourer of well past middle age, a tall straight man with a proud grizzled head, good black hat of soft felt low in the crown, white scarf, white jacket, dark-brown corduroys above gleaming black boots.

On the open heath behind the stalls they are selling horses by auction. Enormous cart-horses plunge out of the groups of men and animals and carry a little man suspended from their necks; stout men in grey gaiters and black hats bobble after. Or more decorously the animals are trotted up and down between rows of men away from the auctioneer and back again, their price in guineas mingling with the statement that they are real workers, while a small boy hustles them with whip and shout from behind, and a big stiff man leads them and, to turn them at the end of the run, shoves his broad back into their withers. The Irish dealers traffic apart and try to sell without auction. Their horses and ponies, braided with primrose and scarlet, stand in a quiet row. Suddenly a boy leads out one on a halter, a hard, plump, small-headed beast bucking madly, and makes it circle rapidly about him, stopping it abruptly and starting it again, with a stiff pink flag which he flaps in its face or pokes into its ribs; if the beast refuses he raises a high loud “whoo-hoop” and curses or growls like an animal. For perhaps five minutes this goes on, the boy never abating his oaths and growls and whoops and flirtings of the pink flag. The horse is led back; a muttering calm follows; another horse is led out. Here and there are groups of cart-mares with huge pedestalled feet and their colts, or of men bending forward over long ash-sticks and talking in low tones. Horses race or walk or are backed into the crowd. Droves of bullocks are driven through the furze. Rows of bulls, sweating but silent and quiet, bow their heads and wait as on a frieze. Again the pink flags are flourished, and the dealer catches a horsy stranger by the arm and whispers and shows him the mare’s teeth. This dealer is a big Irishman with flattened face and snaky nose, his voice deep and laughing. He smiles continually, but when he sees a possible buyer he puts on an artful expression so transparent that his merry face shines clearly underneath and remains the same in triumph or rebuke—is the same at the end of the day when he leads off his horses and stopping at a wayside inn drinks on the kerb, but first gives the one nearest him a gulp from the tankard.

All night—for a week—it rains, and at last there is a still morning of mist. A fire of weeds and hedge-clippings in a little flat field is smouldering. The ashes are crimson, and the bluish-white smoke flows in a divine cloudy garment round the boy who rakes over the ashes. The heat is great, and the boy, straight and well made, wearing close gaiters of leather that reach above the knees, is languid at his task, and often leans upon his rake to watch the smoke coiling away from him like a monster reluctantly fettered and sometimes bursting into an anger of sprinkled sparks. He adds some wet hay, and the smoke pours out of it like milky fleeces when the shearer reveals the inmost wool with his shears. Above and beyond him the pale blue sky is dimly white-clouded over beech woods, whose many greens and yellows and yellow-greens are softly touched by the early light which cannot penetrate to the blue caverns of shade underneath. Athwart the woods rises a fount of cottage-smoke from among mellow and dim roofs. Under the smoke and partly scarfed at times by a drift from it is the yellow of sunflower and dahlia, the white of anemone, the tenderest green and palest purple of a thick cluster of autumn crocuses that have broken out of the dark earth and stand surprised, amidst their own weak light as of the underworld from which they have come. Robins sing among the fallen apples, and the cooing of wood-pigeons is attuned to the soft light and the colours of the bowers. The yellow apples gleam. It is the gleam of melting frost. Under all the dulcet warmth of the face of things lurks the bitter spirit of the cold. Stand still for more than a few moments and the cold creeps with a warning and then a menace into the breast. That is the bitterness that makes this morning of all others in the year so mournful in its beauty. The colour and the grace invite to still contemplation and long draughts of dream; the frost compels to motion. The scent is that of wood-smoke, of fruit and of some fallen leaves. This is the beginning of the pageant of autumn, of that gradual pompous dying which has no parallel in human life yet draws us to it, with sure bonds. It is a dying of the flesh, and we see it pass through a kind of beauty which we can only call spiritual, of so high and inaccessible a strangeness is it. The sight of such perfection as is many times achieved before the end awakens the never more than lightly sleeping human desire of permanence. Now, now is the hour; let things be thus; thus for ever; there is nothing further to be thought of; let these remain. And yet we have a premonition that remain they must not for more than a little while. The motion of the autumn is a fall, a surrender, requiring no effort, and therefore the mind cannot long be blind to the cycle of things as in the spring it can when the effort and delight of ascension veils the goal and the decline beyond. A few frosts now, a storm of wind and rain, a few brooding mists, and the woods that lately hung dark and massive and strong upon the steep hills are transfigured and have become cloudily light and full of change and ghostly fair; the crowing of a cock in the still misty morning echoes up in the many-coloured trees like a challenge to the spirits of them to come out and be seen, but in vain. For months the woods have been homely and kind, companions and backgrounds to our actions and thoughts, the wide walls of a mansion utterly our own. We could have gone on living with them for ever. We had given up the ardours, the extreme ecstasy of our first bridal affection, but we had not forgotten them. We could not become indifferent to the Spanish chestnut-trees that grow at the top of the steep rocky banks on either side of the road and mingle their foliage overhead. Of all trees well-grown chestnuts are among the most pleasant to look up at. For the foliage is not dense and it is for the most part close to the large boughs, so that the light comes easily down through all the horizontal leaves, and the shape of each separate one is not lost in the multitude, while at the same time the bold twists of the branches are undraped or easily seen through such translucent green. The trunks are crooked, and the handsome deep furrowing of the bark is often spirally cut. The limbs are few and wide apart so as to frame huge delicately lighted and shadowed chambers of silence or of birds’ song. The leaves turn all together to a leathern hue, and when they fall stiffen and display their shape on the ground and long refuse to be merged in the dismal trodden hosts. But when the first one floats past the eye and is blown like a canoe over the pond we recover once more our knowledge and fear of Time. All those ladders of goose-grass that scaled the hedges of spring are dead grey; they are still in their places, but they clamber no longer. The chief flower is the yellow bloom set in the dark ivy round the trunks of the ash-trees; and where it climbs over the holly and makes a solid sunny wall, and in the hedges, a whole people of wasps and wasp-like flies are always at the bloom with crystal wings, except when a passing shadow disperses them for a moment with one buzz. But these cannot long detain the eye from the crumbling woods in the haze or under the large white clouds—from the amber and orange bracken about our knees and the blue recesses among the distant golden beeches when the sky is blue but beginning to be laden with loose rain-clouds, from the line of leaf-tipped poplars that bend against the twilight sky; and there is no scent of flowers to hide that of dead leaves and rotting fruit. We must watch it until the end, and gain slowly the philosophy or the memory or the forgetfulness that fits us for accepting winter’s boon. Pauses there are, of course, or what seem pauses in the declining of this pomp; afternoons when the rooks waver and caw over their beechen town and the pigeons coo content; dawns when the white mist is packed like snow over the vale and the high woods take the level beams and a hundred globes of dew glitter on every thread of the spiders’ hammocks or loose perpendicular nets among the thorns, and through the mist rings the anvil a mile away with a music as merry as that of the daws that soar and dive between the beeches and the spun white cloud; mornings full of the sweetness of mushrooms and blackberries from the short turf among the blue scabious bloom and the gorgeous brier; empurpled evenings before frost when the robin sings passionate and shrill and from the garden earth float the smells of a hundred roots with messages of the dark world; and hours full of the thrush’s soft November music. The end should come in heavy and lasting rain. At all times I love rain, the early momentous thunderdrops, the perpendicular cataract shining, or at night the little showers, the spongy mists, the tempestuous mountain rain. I like to see it possessing the whole earth at evening, smothering civilization, taking away from me myself everything except the power to walk under the dark trees and to enjoy as humbly as the hissing grass, while some twinkling house-light or song sung by a lonely man gives a foil to the immense dark force. I like to see the rain making the streets, the railway station, a pure desert, whether bright with lamps or not. It foams all the roofs and trees and bubbles into the water-butts. It gives the grey rivers a demonic majesty. It scours the roads, sets the flints moving, and exposes the glossy chalk in the tracks through the woods. It does work that will last as long as the earth. It is about eternal business. In its noise and myriad aspect I feel the mortal beauty of immortal things. And then after many days the rain ceases at midnight with the wind, and in the silence of dawn and frost the last rose of the world is dropping her petals down to the glistering whiteness, and there they rest blood-red on the winter’s desolate coast.