A beggar is a rich man on some of these August days, especially one I know, whom first I met some Augusts ago now. A fine Sunday afternoon had sprinkled the quiet and thinly-peopled land with black-dressed men and white-dressed women, the older married couples and their trains of children keeping chiefly to the roads and most straightforward paths, the younger, with one child or none, choosing rather the green lanes, while the lovers and the boys found out tall hedge-sides and the footpaths across which more than one year’s growth of hazel had spread, so that the shortest of the maids must stoop. Many showers following a dry season made miles of the country as clean and fragrant as a garden. Honeysuckle and privet were in every hedge with flowers that bring a thrill of summer bridals on their scent. The brisk wind was thymy from the Downs. The ragwort was in its glory; it rose tall as a man in one straight leap of dark-foliaged stem, and then crowned itself in the boldest and most splendid yellows derived from a dark golden disc and almost lemon rays; it was as if Apollo had come down to keep the flocks of a farmer on these chalk hills and his pomp had followed him out of the sky. A few birds still sang; one lark now and then, a cirl-bunting among the topmost haws of a thorn, chiffchaffs in the bittersweet and hazel of the little copses. There was apparently comfort, abundance and quiet everywhere. They were seen in the rickyards where grand haystacks, newly thatched, stood around ancient walnut-trees. Even the beeches had a decorous look in their smooth boles and perfect lavish foliage. The little patches of flowery turf by the roadside and at corners were brighter and warmer than ever, as the black bees and the tawny skipper butterflies flew from bloom to bloom of the crimson knapweed. Amplest and most unctuous of all in their expression of the ceremonious leisure of the day and the maturity of the season were the cart-horses. They leaned their large heads benignly over the rails or gates; their roan or chestnut flanks were firm and polished; manes, tails and fetlocks spotless; now and then they lifted up their feet and pressed their toes into the ground, showing their enormous shoes that shone and were of girth sufficient to make a girdle for the lightest of the maids passing by.