The Old Pensioner Came To The Door For His Bread And Cheese: 'The Wind's In The South' He Said, 'and I Hopes She'll Stay There' Five Dull Yellow Spots On The Hedge - Gorse Bloom - That Had Remained Unchanged For So Many Weeks, Took A Fresh Colour And Became Golden.

By the constant passing of the waggons and carts along the road that had been so silent it was evident that the busy time of spring was here.

There would be rough weather, doubtless, now and again, but it would not again be winter.

Dark patches of cloud - spots of ink on the sky, the 'messengers' - go drifting by; and after them will follow the water-carriers, harnessed to the south and west winds, drilling the long rows of rain like seed into the earth. After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few days, the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap them with a fillip - only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety.

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