family pretend to shelter from the windy rain; the man stands moody, holding the pony, the women crouch with chins upon knees, the children laugh and will not be still. They belong to the little roads that are dying out: they hate the sword-like shelterless road, the booming cars that go straight to the city in the vale below. They are less at home there than the swallows that haunt the leeward sides of the sycamores, ever rushing up towards the trees and ever beaten back, like children playing “I’m the king of the castle,” at the verge of the city. There, by the inn piano, soldiers and their friends and women sing with vague pathos songs about “Mother” and “Dear Love” and “Farewell” and “Love is all” and “The girls,” while the streets glitter and gurgle with rain. Just before night the sky clears. It is littered with small dark clouds upon rose, like rocks on a wild and solitary coast of after-tempest calm, and it is infinitely remote and infinitely alluring. Those clouds are the Islands of the Blest. Even so alluring might be this life itself, this world, if I were out of it. For a moment I fancy how I might lean and watch it all, being dead. For a moment only, since the poverty of death is such that we cannot hope from it such a gift of contemplation from afar, cannot hope even that once out of the world we may turn round and look at it and feel that we are not of it any more, nor hope that we shall know ourselves to be dead and be satisfied. Rain shrouds the islands of the sky: the singers find them in their song. In the morning the ground is beautiful with blue light from one white-clouded pane of sky that will not be hidden by the tumultuous rain. Outside the city the new thatch of the ricks shines pale in the sodden land, which presently gives way to a great water with leaning masts and a majestic shadowy sweep of trees down to the flat shore, to level green marsh and bridges crossing the streams that are announced by ripples in the sun, by swishing sedge, by willows blenching. Beyond is forest again. First, scattered cottages and little yellow apples beaming pale on crooked trees; then solitudes of heather and bracken, traversed and lighted by blue waters, ponds and streams among flats of rushes; and beyond, at either hand, woods on low and high land endlessly changing from brightness to gloom under windy clouds. The roads are yellow, and oaks and beeches hang over them in whispering companies. The wind reigns, in the high magnificent onset of the clouds, in the surging trees, in the wings of rooks and daws, in bowing sedges and cotton grass, in quivering heather and grass, in rippling water, in wildly flying linen; yet in the open there is a strange silence because the roar in my ears as I walk deafens me to all sound.