Coming over the Downs one winter’s morning, I saw a thin blue spiral of smoke rising from the very centre of a great patch of gorse on a hill-side; and threading my way through the wilderness, bent on elucidating this phenomenon, I came at length upon a queer little scene. At the mouth of a sort of cave cut deep into the solid green heart of the gorse thicket, burned a little fire of sticks; and over it hung a pot that gave forth a savoury steam. Behind the fire lay Darkie on a snug couch of hay and old sacking, fast asleep, with a pipe in his mouth. Evidently he had dozed off in the midst of his preparations for a meal. I took one swift look round his castle, noting various old tins, old coats, and the like hanging over his head; several sugar-boxes filled with odd lumber behind him; and a shepherd’s folding-bar—a deadly weapon, twenty pounds or so of solid iron—lying conveniently to his hand; and then I crept away, as silently as I had come. Not that I feared any violence from him. In all the years we had been acquainted, I had never known him harm a mouse. But many was the time I had turned him away from my own door, unceremoniously enough; sometimes with hard words, once or twice, indeed, with threatenings of his natural enemy, the constable. And I feared now reprisals of a kind that would hurt almost as much as the folding-bar heftily wielded—I feared to see Darkie stagger to his feet and pull off to me one of my own long-discarded caps, hear him give me generous and courtly words of welcome, and a kind look out of his mastiff’s eyes, making me as free of his snug, green-roofed dwelling as I had so often made him free of the street. Towards the hour of sunset I went up to the little attic window again, and looked out over the drenched housetops for any sign of a break in the weather. The rain had ceased, and the western sky had lightened somewhat, taking on an indefinable warmth of hue. There was no sunshine, nor any hope of sunshine; but there was a light abroad that picked out all the browns and reds and yellows in the landscape, wondrously intensifying them, while leaving all other hues as grey and cold as ever. Past eleven o’clock, and a cloudless night of stars, with the wood-larks singing high over the village, and the cuckoos calling in the hills as though it were broad day. Yes—the change has come: Farmer Coles is never far out in his prognostications. It will be cutting weather to-morrow; and to-morrow I must be up with the earliest of them, and away to the Hoe-field. IV