Turn out of this main road, and by-ways that tempt neither cyclists nor motorists go almost as straight. Here is no famous house, not a single inn or church, but only the unspoilt Weald, and far away, a long viaduct that carries noiseless trains against the sky above hollow meadows. Bluebell, primrose, anemone--anemone, primrose, bluebell--star and cloud the lush banks and the roots of the blackthorns, hazels and maples of the hedge. A stream washes the roots of many oaks, and flows past flat fields of dusky grass, cuckoo flower and marigold,--black pines at the verge. The light smoke of a roadside fire ascends into the new leaves of the hazels where two tramps are drying their clothes. Many oaks are down, and lie pale and gleaming like mammoth bones among the bluebells in plantations roughened by old flint pits. The faggots of oak tops and cords of twisted timber are being made up; the woodmen light a fire and the chips fly from the axes. It is only to these men that I am a stranger as I walk through the land. At first I admire the hardihood and simplicity of their necessary toil among the oaks, but they lift their dark eyes, and then--it is as strange as when I pass a white embowered house, and the road is muffled with straw, and I hear by chance that some one unknown is dying behind that open window through which goes the thrush’s song and the children’s homeward chatter. Neither townsman or countryman, I cannot know them. The countryman knows their trades and their speech, and is of their kind; the townsman’s curiosity wins him a greeting. But in May at least I am content, in the steep little valley made by a tributary of the Medway, its sides wooded with oak and the flowers glad of the sun among the lately cleared undergrowth, and the cuckoo now in this oak and now in that, and the turtle-doves whose voices, in the soft lulls after rain, make the earth seem to lie out sleek in the sun, stretching itself to purr with eyes closed. The cuckoo is gone before we know what his cry is to tell us or to remind us of. There are few things as pleasant as the thunder and lightning of May that comes in the late afternoon, when the air is as solid as the earth with stiff grey rain for an hour. There is no motion anywhere save of this perpendicular river, of the swaying rain-hit bough and quivering leaf. But through it all the thrushes sing, and jolly as their voices are the roars and echoes of the busy thunder quarrying the cliffs of heaven. And then the pleasure of being so wet that you may walk through streams and push through thickets and be none the wetter for it. Before it is full night the light of the young moon falls for a moment out of a troubled but silent sky upon the young corn, and the tranquil bells are calling over the woods.