How fast time flies you can never truly estimate until you go step and step with it through the summer woods and fields. In a sense, town-life—where there is so much of permanence in environment—puts a drag on time, and not seldom pulls it up altogether. Moreover, in towns time is estimated by events, by experiences. You hear a great musician, see a great play, look on at some magnificent pageant, or are shocked by some catastrophe; and straightway there is half a lifetime of emotion thrust between two strokes of the clock. By so much in very truth your life has been lengthened; for it is the intensity of living that counts in the civic tale of years. If you find an old man not only declaring that he has lived long, but believing it, it is a great chance but he tells you so in the close-clipped cockney tongue of the town. And yet it is better to live in some far-away country nook like Windlecombe, and be reminded with every gliding summer hour that time flies and life is short, if only because of the undoubted fact that such a frame of mind carries a belief in eternal youth as a necessary implication. Between life’s dawn and the dusk of its western sky, there is literally no time to grow old in a natural, aboriginal environment. So inextricably interwoven are the threads of human existence and that of the green world round about, that the annual rejuvenation of the one infallibly communicates itself to the other. With every spring we start life afresh. Though we may live to threescore years and ten, we are children still; and come upon death at last like an unexpected gust at a corner, old age unrealised to the very end. In the weeks that are closing now, I have heard and seen more of the galloping hoofs of this swift, high-stepping jade, summer, than is good for entire peace of mind. Years ago I made a vow that I would never again eke out the fleeting golden days, like a miser to whom spending is not pleasure but only pain. I vowed that I would always squander time at this season; let it drift by unthinkingly; get my fill of sunshine, and fill and fill again to my heart’s content; yet do it as a strayed heifer in the corn, wantoning over an acre to each mouthful. But this time, as ever, the good resolution has been forgotten. The old parsimony has dogged the way at every step. I must be up with the sun in the small hours of each morning, fearful of losing a single beam from the millions. To waste in sleep the blue, spangled summer nights, when all the country-side is resonant of life and fragrant with the scent that comes only with the darkness, has seemed like sacrilege. Yet, for all my industry, July is nearing its end, and I know that I have drunk but a drop or two out of its vast ocean. And already I have renewed the old vow, to be disregarded as ever, doubtless, when July again comes round.