In the crevices blue tits
build deep inside passages that abruptly turn, and baffle egg-stealers.
Partridges come over with a whir, but just clearing the top, gliding on
extended wings, which to the eye look like a slight brown crescent.
The
waggoners who go by know that the great hawthorn bastions are favourite
resorts of wood-pigeons and missel-thrushes. The haws are ripe in autumn
and the ivy berries in spring, so that the bastions yield a double crop.
A mallow, the mauve petals of which even the dust of the road cannot
impair, flowers here and there on the dry bank below, and broad
moon-daisies among the ripe and almost sapless grass of midsummer.
If any one climbed the wall from the park and looked across at the plain
of corn-fields in early spring, everywhere there would be seen brown dots
in the air - above the first slender green blades; above the freshly
turned dark furrows; above the distant plough, the share of which,
polished like a silver mirror by friction with the clods, reflects the
sunshine, flashing a heliograph message of plenty from the earth;
everywhere brown dots, and each a breathing creature - larks ceaselessly
singing, and all unable to set forth their joy. Swift as is the vibration
of their throats, they cannot pour the notes fast enough to express their
eager welcome. As a shower falls from the sky, so falls the song of the
larks. There is no end to them: they are everywhere; over every acre away
across the plain to the downs, and up on the highest hill. Every crust of
English bread has been sung over at its birth in the green blade by a
lark.
If one looked again in June, the clover itself, a treasure of beauty and
sweetness, would be out, and the south wind would come over acres of
flower - acres of clover, beans, tares, purple trifolium, far-away crimson
sainfoin (brightest of all on the hills), scarlet poppies, pink
convolvulus, yellow charlock, and green wheat coming into ear. In August,
already squares would be cut into the wheat, and the sheaves rising,
bound about the middle, hour-glass fashion; some breadths of wheat
yellow, some golden-bronze; besides these, white barley and oats, and
beans blackening. Turtle-doves would be in the stubble, for they love to
be near the sheaves. The hills after or during rain look green and near;
on sunny days, a far and faint blue. Sometimes the sunset is caught in
the haze on them and lingers, like a purple veil about the ridges. In the
dusk hares come heedlessly along; the elder-bushes gleam white with
creamy petals through the night.
Sparrows and partridges alike dust themselves in the white dust, an inch
deep, of midsummer, in the road between the wall and the corn - a pitiless
Sahara road to traverse at noonday in July, when the air is still and you
walk in a hollow way, the yellow wheat on one side and the wall on the
other.
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