Natural history -- Outdoor books; Nature; Nature study; Paris (France) -- Description and travel
Along the footpath we travel slowly; you cannot walk fast very long in
a footpath; no matter how rapidly at first, you soon lessen your pace,
and so country people always walk slowly. The stiles--how stupidly they
are put together. For years and years every one who has passed them, as
long as man can remember, has grumbled at them; yet there they are
still, with the elms reaching high above, and cows gazing over--cows
that look so powerful, but so peacefully yield the way. They are a
better shape than the cattle of the ancient time, less lanky, and with
fewer corners; the lines, to talk in yachtsman's language, are finer.
Roan is a colour that contrasts well with meadows and hedges. The
horses are finer, both cart-horse and nag. Approaching the farmsteads,
there are hay-ricks, but there are fewer corn-ricks. Instead of the
rows on rows, like the conical huts of a savage town, there are but a
few, sometimes none. So many are built in the fields and threshed there
"to rights," as the bailiff would say. It is not needful to have them
near home or keep them, now the threshing-machine has stayed the flail
and emptied the barns. Perhaps these are the only two losses to those
who look at things and mete them with the eye--the corn-ricks and the
barns. The corn-ricks were very characteristic, but even now you may
see plenty if you look directly after harvest. The barns are going by
degrees, passing out of the life of farming; let us hope that some of
them will be converted into silos, and so saved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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