Many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or stain. It is a May morning, warm and slightly breezy after midnight rain. In the beech-woods the trees are unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to leaf and down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. At the edge of the wood the privet branches are bent down by the weight of raindrops of the size of peas. The dewy white stitchwort stars and the feathered grasses are curved over on the banks. The sainfoin is hoary and sparkling as I move. Already the sun is hot and the sky blue, with faint white clouds in whirls. And in the orchard-trees and drenched luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler sings a subdued note of rushing, bubbling liquidity as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations among the fleshy-leaved water-plants. The bird’s head is uplifted; its throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from branch to branch, but always renews its song on the new perch; being leaf-like, it is not easily seen. And sometimes through this continuous jargon the small, wild song of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression of moist warm dawns in May thickets of hawthorn-bloom and earliest roses. On such a dawn the very spirit bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the fragrance with delight; but it is no sooner left behind with May than it has developed within me into an hour and a scene of utmost grace and bliss, save that I am in it myself. It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden or Golden Age Nature has in her gift, as if she silently recorded the backward dreams of each generation and reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is, for instance, an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their breath in the white road between banks of hazel and thorn. The boy who is driving them to the morning’s pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively, in turn, as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “Wo, Cherry! Now, Dolly! Wo, Fancy! Strawberry!... Blanche!... Blossom!... Cowslip!... Rosy! Smut!... Come along, Handsome!... Wo, Snowdrop!... Lily!... Darky!... Roany!... Come along, Annie!” Here the road is pillowed with white aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry scent of nettle and cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect mingling of harebell and foxglove among the bracken and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes to their lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, and the boy hangs on the gate to see the men and women walking, black-haired, upright, bright-eyed, and on the name-board of the cart the words: “Naomi Sherwood, Burley, Hampshire.” These things also propose to the roving, unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, one that is passing, not, let us hope, the very last.