Had any one studied either of these three, the great elms in the Out-park, or the thin twisted screen of hedge, or the red-tile roof, and the yellow stubble behind it on the hill, he might have found material for a picture in each. There was, in truth, in each far more than any one could put into a picture, or than any one could put into a book; for the painter can but give one aspect of one day, and the writer a mere catalogue of things; but nature refreshes the reality every day with different tints, and as it were new ideas, so that, although it is always there, it is never twice the same. Over that stubble on the hill there were other hills, and among these a coombe or valley, in which stood just such another farmhouse, but so differently placed, with few trees, and those low, somewhat bare in its immediate surroundings, but above, on each side, close at hand, sloping ramparts of green turf rising high, till the larks that sang above seemed to sing in another land, like that found by Jack when he clomb the beanstalk. Along this coombe was a cover of gorse, and in spring there was a mile of golden bloom, richer than gold in colour, leading like a broad highway of gold down to the house. From those ramparts in high summer—which is when the corn is ripe and the reapers in it—there could be seen a slope divided into squares of varied grain. This on the left of the fertile undulation was a maize colour, which, when the sunlight touched it, seemed to have a fleeting hue of purple somewhere within. There is no purple in ripe wheat visible to direct and considering vision; look for it specially, and it will not be seen. Purple forms no part of any separate wheatear or straw; brown and yellow in the ear, yellow in the upper part of the straw, and still green towards the earth. But when the distant beams of sunlight travelling over the hill swept through the rich ripe grain, for a moment there was a sense of purple on the retina. Beyond this square was a pale gold piece, and then one where the reapers had worked hard, and the shocks stood in diagonal rows; this was a bronze, or brown and bronze, and beside it was a green of clover.