to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. More large and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as I pass through it, under the hoverings of the low-flying but swiftly-turning nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. It closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dipping its last spray in the dew of the grass. The day is a Sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel in the broad arable country that ripples in squares of green, or brown, or yellow, or grey, to the green Downs and their dark, high-perched woods. As if for some invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened barns against which they lean; the grass and the noble trees, the groups of wayside aspen, the line of horse-chestnuts, the wych-elms on both sides of the road, the one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company of sycamores above the cross--the spacious thatch and tiles of the farmyard quadrangle--the day newly painted in white and blue--the green so green in the hedges, and the white and purple so pure in the flowers--all seem to be meant for eyes that know nothing of Time and of what “brought death into the world and all our woe.” And in this solitude the young birds are very happy. They have taken possession of the thick hedges, of the roadside grass, of the roads themselves. They flutter and run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. These at least are admitted into the kingdom along with that strange wildfowl that lives “to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.”