The park-like English landscape, with its hedgerow trees and its lush fields, that does not look like as if it really were the country, but seems a series of pleasure-grounds cut off into convenient squares, was at its time of greatest beauty and its greatest artificiality. Cows swollen with grass till they looked like balloons lay in the fields and chewed the cud. Geese cackled as they strayed upon the common, just as they appear to cackle in a thousand water-colours. The hum of bees was in the limes. Dragon-flies hawked swiftly over the oily waters of the two slow-flowing rivers that made the farm almost an island in a suburban Mesopotamia, scarce twenty miles away from Charing Cross. An air of peace and of contentment, of long well-being and security, was evident in everything. Trees flourished, though stag-headed, under which the Roundhead troopers may have camped, or at the least, veterans from Marlborough’s wars might have sat underneath their shade, and smoked as they retold their fights. A one-armed signboard, weathered, and with the lettering almost illegible, pointed out the bridle-path to Ditchley, now little used, except by lovers on a Sunday afternoon, but where the feet of horses for generations in the past had trampled it, still showing clearly as it wound through the fields. In the standing corn the horses yoked to the reaping machine stood resting, now and again shaking the tassels on their little netted ear-covers. They, too, came of a breed long used to peace and plenty, good food and treatment, and short hours of work. The kindly landscape and the settled life of centuries had formed the kind of man of which the farmer was a prototype,—slow-footed and slow-tongued, and with his mind as bowed as were his shoulders with hard work, by the continual pressure of the hierarchy of wealth and station, that had left him as much adscript to them as any of his ancestors had been bound to their glebes. He held the _Daily Mail_, his gospel and his _vade mecum_, crumpled in his hand as if he feared to open it again to read more details of the war. A simple soul, most likely just as oppressive to his labourers as his superiors had always showed themselves to him, he could not bear to read of violence, as all the tyranny that he had bent under had been imposed so subtly that he could never see more than the shadow of the hand that had oppressed him. It pained him, above all things, to read about the wounded and dead horses lying in the corn, especially as he had “’eard the ’arvest over there in Belgium was going to be good.” The whirr of the machines reaping the wheatfield sounded like the hum of some gigantic insect, and as the binder ranged the sheaves in rows it seemed as if the golden age had come upon the earth again, bringing with it peace and plenty, with perhaps slightly stouter nymphs than those who once followed the sickle-men in Arcady.