turning many a meadow into a veritable field of the cloth of gold, and there are few prettier sights in nature than an English hay field on a summer evening, with a copse perhaps at one side and a brook on the other; men with forks tossing the hay in the air to dry; women with wooden rakes arranging it in swathes ready for the great four-horse waggon, or collecting it in cocks for the night; while some way off the mowers are still at work, and we hear from time to time the pleasant sound of the whetting of the scythe. All are working with a will lest rain should come and their labour be thrown away. This too often happens. But though we often complain of our English climate, it is yet, take it all in all, one of the best in the world, being comparatively free from extremes either of heat or cold, drought or deluge. To the happy mixture of sunshine and of rain we owe the greenness of our fields, sparkling with dewdrops Indwelt with little angels of the Sun,[37] lit and warmed by golden sunshine And fed by silver rain, which now and again sprinkles the whole earth with diamonds. FOOTNOTES: [22] _The Spectator._ [23] Milton. [24] Jefferies. [25] Forbes, _A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago_. [26] Tennyson. [27] Hamerton. [28] Marvell. [29] Ruskin. [30] Thomson, _Voyage of the Challenger_. [31] Thomson, _Voyage of the Challenger_. [32] Sir J. Paget, _On the Pathology of Plants_. [33] Evelyn's _Sylva_. [34] _Modern Painters._ [35] M. Correvon informs me that the Gruyere cheese is supposed to owe its peculiar flavour to the alpine Alchemilla, which is now on that account often purposely sown elsewhere. [36] J. R. Lowell. [37] Hamerton. CHAPTER VI MOUNTAINS Mountains "seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons for the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper. They are great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars."--RUSKIN. [Illustration: SUMMIT OF MONT BLANC. _To face page 203._] CHAPTER VI MOUNTAINS