Why are there no swifts to race and scream? We fret over these stages of the descending year; we dream on such a day as this that there is no need of farther descent. We would preserve those days of the reaping; we have lost them; but we recall them now when the steam-plough has furrowed the sheeny stubble, and long for the day when the gentle north wind can only just stir the clusters of aspen-leaves, and the branches are motionless. The nut bushes hang dreamily, heavily, over the white cool roads. The wood-pigeon’s is the sole voice in the oak woods of the low hills, except that once or twice a swift screams as he pursues that martial flight of his--as of one who swings a sword as he goes--towards the beeches and hop gardens of the higher hills in the north; it is perhaps the last day for more than eight months that his cry will be heard. A few barley-straws hang from the hazels; some leaves are yellow. Autumn, in fact, seems possible to the mind that is not perfectly content with these calm sweet airs and the sense of the fulness of things. At a crossing a small island is made amidst this and three other roads, and on the island stands an oast house with two mellow cones and white leaning cowls; and beside it a simple tiled cart-lodge, dimly displaying massive wheels, curving bulwarks of waggons and straight shafts behind its doorless pillars of rough-hewn wood. Making one group with these, though separated from them by one road, is an old red farmhouse, of barely distinguishable timber and brick, with white-edged dormers and lower windows and doors, entrenched behind hollyhocks of deepest red and the burning discs of everlasting sunflowers. Behind the gates stand four haystacks brightly thatched, and one that is dark and old and carved into huge stairs. Notice the gate into the rickyard. It is of the usual five oak bars; and across these is a diagonal bar from the lowest end nearest the hinge to the upper end of the opposite side, and from top to bottom a perpendicular cross-bar divides the gate. The top bar marks it as no common gate made at a factory with a hundred others of the same kind, though there are scores of them in Kent. It thickens gradually towards the hinge end of the gate, and then much more decidedly so that it resembles a gun-barrel and stock; and just where the stock begins it is carved with something like a trigger-guard; the whole being well proportioned, graceful but strong. In all the best gates of Kent, Sussex and Surrey and the South Country there is an approach to this form, usually without the trigger-guard, but sometimes having instead a much more elaborate variation of it which takes away from the dignity and simplicity of the gate. At the road’s edge crooked quince-trees lean over a green pond and green but nearly yellow straight reeds; and four cart-horses, three sorrels and a grey, are grouped under one stately walnut.