It was hard to conceive the nightingale’s song without the loveliness of the mowing-grass—the green dragon-flies cruising over its sea of blossom, the shadows of the swallows’ wings upon it, and the grumbling bees like pearl-divers at fault down in its emerald depths. But now, listening to the songs of the birds in the village gardens round about, songs that seemed all the more joyous for the grey light and the unceasing patter of the rain, the truth fell cold upon me that the nightingale’s was no longer among them. But a few days past, she was keening as sorrowfully as ever. In the one glimpse of soused moonshine last night I had thought to hear her plaint far down by the river; but I could not be sure of it, and the sound had not returned. Maybe her song is done at last, and I could wish it so, now that the grass is to fall. With a little neck-craning, I can contrive a view of the Reverend’s garden, or as much of it as is discernible through the crowding trees. On the smooth fair lawn I can see his white doves strutting, but they are there alone to-day. Generally, when I look forth, there is the gaunt black figure pacing to and fro, with these snow-white atoms fluttering about its feet. At the end of the lawn an arm goes out, and the figure pulls up at the first touch on the rose-covered trellis. There is the bank of mignonette at the other end, and here he halts and turns, warned by the music of the bees. But I have never been able to guess what guides him unerringly between the rippled edges of the flower-beds; nor why, when walking under the wall, hung from end to end with blue racemes of wistaria, he goes no farther each way than the limit of the blossoms’ reach. The gleaming white turrets of syringa, of acacia, of guelder rose, these I know are just visible to him; and his doves lighten the darkness a little about his feet. But there are whole stretches of the garden given over to deep-hued things—rhododendrons and peonies, canterbury-bells and flaming tiger-lilies; amidst these he must pass with eyes as little aware of their passionate colour as I of the tiger-moth’s scarlet when he burrs in my ear at night. Yet is glowing colour of a truth a thing that reaches us through one sense alone? I have doubted it ever since—