High sang the larks over the meadow, striving with fluttering wings to reach the blue vision of heaven. Their voices trailed to the earth and filled the heart with hope and joy. Afar, the noisy rooks fed their young in the colony in the elm-tops; at hand, on the ground, golden buttercup and white moon-daisy, lemon-coloured hawk-weed and obstinate charlock, beloved of the visiting bee for its great dowry of honey. The sunbeams had flooded the cold earth during the springtide of the year, and now the earth had sent its flowers and its grasses with their faces turned above, whence came the light that was life, the light that was truth to the birds and the bees, the flowers and the grasses. For years I pondered the higher meaning of life, studying in a city, amid the smoke and clattering hum of traffic; the wild ones have never needed to seek--they have been happy by the brook with its lanced sunpoints and swallowy song of summer over the pebbles and the mossy boulders; they have had no illusions. Nor have they needed philosophies or discarnate paradises. Everything loved the mowing meadow. By the stream the blackbirds sought for food, the finches came to sip, the hover-flies fanned above the kingcups. Scarlet soldier flies and little plain moths clung to bennet-bloom and spray-like awn, the wind sighed in the grasses as it shook the dust-pollen from the heads. The meadow grasses were timorous of the breeze, and trembled at its coming, like the heart of a maiden reluctant yet yearning: whispering to the wind to bear the seeds, for the mowers would come shortly. Over the water-meadow the lapwings wheeled and spun--the lapwing holds the secret of the swamps and boglands, and you hear it in his wild voice as his wings sough above. In the early spring he makes over the dull furrows his plaintive music, climbing high and diving to the ground as though it were sweet ecstasy to fall, wing-crumpled and broken-hearted, before his mate. Something in the call of the peewit fills me with sadness, like the memory of those passed springs that were in boyhood so glamorous. The peewit’s song is wild, he knows that all things pass, that the leaves and the flowers will die and nothing remain. Now, as he saw me, his voice was harsher, more husky; somewhere among the tufts of spiked grass his young were crouching, depending on their plumage in harmony with the ground to remain unseen. _See-oo-sweet, see-oo-sweet, woo_, cried the mother: her curled crest was visible against the sky as she turned on broad pinions. _ii_