Summer, too, had its fierce, immeasurable joys. This was the season of outdoor sports, hunting and boating and digging holes to New Zealand. There was cricket, real cricket, which means that you are out if you hit the ball into the next garden, and that you stop playing if you break a window, and there was hurling of javelins in wild shrubberies, and dabbling in silver brooks for elusive minnows. Later there would come long, adventurous journeys in railway-trains, when, like wise travellers, we would cuddle provisions of buns and pears and tepid sandwiches in our laps. Our legs would be so stiff when we reached our destination that we would totter on the platform like old men, and our eyes would be weary with watching the fleeting world. But as the cab crept up the gritty hills we would see the ocean waiting for us to come and play with it, and everything else in life would be forgotten. The country, with its apple-trees and its pigs and its secret places, was not to be despised, but it was the sea that led us home to our dreams. Yet possibly the finest thing that the summer had to give us was the healthy, joyous sense of fatigue that comes from games. It was pleasant to drop on the lawn when cricket was over, and stay there, not wholly displeased with the scent of the flowers, looking into the blue sky until the gnats drove you in to tea. It was pleasant to lie on the beach, with the heat creeping up and down your face, and to let the sand trickle through your fingers, while the long waves whispered out to sea. It was pleasant to drowse in the hay after hunting buffaloes all the sunny afternoon. It was only at such moments, when the air had a savour of sleep, that we really felt conscious of youth as a desirable possession. A child’s year would be divided abruptly into winter and summer, for youth is impatient of compromise, but as things are, there are spring and autumn to be reckoned with. For autumn, there is not much to be said. There were nuts and blackberries, and the sweet-scented fallen leaves, in which we would paddle up to our knees. But the seaside brown was wearing off our legs, and night came so soon and with so harsh and boisterous a note. It was not bad when we happened to be feeling very brave to lie awake at night and hear the branches screaming when the wind hurt them. The sheer discomfort of the outer world made bed delicious. But the necessary courage for this point of view was rare, and normally we would wish the nights quieter and less exciting. The autumn wind was for ever fumbling at our nursery windows like a burglar, or creeping along the passages like a supernatural thing. Sometimes our hearts stopped beating while we listened.