“Well,” said Malory, “I have made my confession now, for it partakes of the nature of confession. I never saw that piteous finery again, and I never saw the mood that matched it. She calmed down at length, and we made a compact of friendship, but if ever the name of Penshurst arose in conversation I saw the scarlet flags fluttering in her cheeks. “Meanwhile the familiarity of the place grew on me, as I had foreseen, and there were many inmates of the farm, now old-established, whom I had known since their birth; plants and animals alike. We were haymaking, a common enough pursuit, but to me full of delight; I loved the ready fields, the unceasing whirr and rattle of the cutter, the browning grass as it lay where it had fallen, and the rough wooden rake in my hand. I loved the curve of the fields over the hill, and the ridges of hay stretching away like furrows. Above all I loved the great stack, which swallowed up the cart-loads one by one, and the green tarpaulins furled above it, which made it look like a galleon with sails and rigging. “I told you I had dipped into many things; I worked once on a Greek trader which plied with figs and oranges from Smyrna to Corinth through the islands of the Ægean. It was a bulky, mediæval-looking vessel, with vast red sails, very little changed, I should imagine, from the one in which Ulysses sailed on his immortal journey. I learnt a certain amount about the orange trade, but I learnt another thing from that Greek ship which I value more: I learnt about colour, hot, tawny colour, that ran the gamut from the bronze limbs of the crew, through the Venetian sails, to the fire of the fruit, and echoed again in the sunset behind Hymettus, and dropped in the cool aquamarine of the waves near the shore, and deepened into sapphire as I hung over the sides of the ship above the moving water. From this rich canvas I had come to the grays and greens and browns of England, the dove after the bird of Paradise, and do you know, I felt the relationship of the two, the relationship of labour between the Greek, the almost pirate, crew, and the English farmer with his classic and primitive tools, the brotherhood between the sweeping scythe and the dipping oar, between the unwieldy stack and the clumsy vessel. “The scent of the hay is in my nostrils, and the stirring is in my arms to throw up my fork-load upon the cart. We worked sometimes till ten at night, a race with the weather; we worked by sunlight and moonlight, and I preferred the latter. You may think that I preferred it because it pleased me to see the round yellow moon come up from behind the trees, and light that wholesome scene with its unwholesome radiance, like a portrait of Hercules, naked, by Aubrey Beardsley? Well, you are wrong. I preferred it because I got less hot.