softened glimmer of pearly colour, neither grey,
nor blue, nor opal, but a union of all, with many
inner depths and glories to be wrought out only
by the patient and loving eye.

I am no great believer in the poetry of sheep
(uncooked), nor in lamb (without mint-sauce), but
in Ramshire the sheep do throw themselves
about the landscape as if they were trained to
group themselves effectively—as my friend,
Mediochre, R.A., says. They sprinkle down the
dun slopes, they cascade down the sides of the
lanes, they come smoking along the dusty roads,
they bleat in great multitudes. They are seen
melting away in little yellow and brown spots,
into the fairy azure of that magical distance
through which glimmer pieces of green corn
brown fallows, golden stacks, white veins of chalk,
greystone patches, emerald pastures, dun mounds
of firs, and dark thickets of almond-scented furze,
that, gradually getting thinner and thinner, break
at last into single specks and dots of bushes which
variegate the down as with an eruption of molehills.

Add to these variations of surface, some firs
in the foreground, like the teeth of a small
tooth-comb; some round chalk basins cut by the
shepherds to catch water; some grassy mounds
of an old Roman camp, rising in triple terrace one
above the other; and you have some idea of the
higher downs taken in their generalities, To
describe them in detail would take a year: for the
beauty of their atmospheric changes alone are
infinite and wonderful.

But can I leave the Down country, with its
quivering blue horizon, out of which the eye
gradually evolves long funeral processions of firs;
little toy farm-houses, so small in the distance
that they are no bigger than a giant could carry
on the palm of his hand (I mean a small giant,
because, of course, a great giant like Brandyborax
or Aldeboron has a palm to his hand as
big as Salisbury Plain); grey spires, sharp
and small as darning-needles; black specks
of furze and bramble; and lesser specks, where
glossy crows feed, or vibrate their wings—must
I, I say, leave the high downs without describing
the little stone tea-caddy of a Downshire church,
built by that worthy but noseless man whose
battered mummy of an effigy still lies, in a
patient but ill-used way, on a flat tomb in the
chancel?

I like the simple church, with the dial over the
porch, erased by time. It is old as the Normans,
I should think, that square tower, so massy and
low, firm as the rock, so phalanxed and solid
in its imperturbable immovability. The sunshine
wanders over it, the ram beats it, the wind
torments it, but it remains as it has stood for
centuries. The green waves of that dead sea around
the yew-tree, rise and fall, century after century,
but the tree is fixed as the good ship's mast: and
daily casts its moving shadow into the chancel to
flicker about the latticing of sun and shade, as
with the movement of passing wings.

There are many country moments when the
songs of birds sound sweet from their very strangeness,
and arrests the attention from its intrusion
on scenes with which it has never been associated.
I like to lie abed early on a spring morning,
and hear all the sounds of life outside the window
that cheer but do not disturb you, so that you
fall into a doze of spring-time thoughts, as you
are trying to listen, until you are made broad
awake by the fuller chorus of young thrushes
in the laurels, who seem to be practising in a
Hullah class, perpetually put right by the fuller
voices of the parent birds; but, best of all, I like
to hear on Sunday, in the Downshire church,
between the pauses of the psalm and the hushes
in the Litany, the response of the vicar's
blackbirds coming in as if they had been trained,
like little choristers, in God's great open-air
cathedral.

Your contemplative Jacques, too, can find
pretty employment in the oak coverts that here
and there strew the surface of Downshire, very
aviaries of song in the pleasant May-time, when
even at noonday the nightingale may be heard
gurgling out rich soprano passages. There, the
negro blackbird, with the orange-bill, repeats
his musical monotone, and the thrush flings
forth his lavish, careless carolling upon the
blue spring air. There, the robin, with breast
stained ever since that "dreadful murder" of the
Children in the Wood, bides his time, when in
autumn he shall flaunt it on the Downshire lawns.
Let us enter the covert through a fir wood,
where, through straight rough-scaled stalks,
oozing balmy tears, spots of moving sunlight
flicker about on the dry pale leaves of last year,
here and there brightened where an angel's visit
of clear light from Heaven pours through and
irradiates some churlish bramble, for all the
world like woman's love hallowing some
unworthy object: some Caliban of a husband, some
Quilp, some ideal Cymon.

From these delights, I stroll botanising to
the fretful nettles—their white flowers soon
to be black with bees—that edge the outer
skirts of the fox covert, where the waterproof
buds of the chesnut are throwing off their
mackintoshes, and the beech is unrolling his
sharp-spiked buds; where the pied hazel is
fluttering its green-winged rods, and the banks are
strewn with primroses—those daylight stars,
soft green where the transparent leaves hood
them in like nuns, soft gold in the sunlight and
paler in the shadow; where radiant bunches of
violets purple the moss that wads the walks and
velvets it for little fairy feet. Or, I find amusement
in tracking the wood-pigeon to his nest by
the piles of split beech-nuts under the selected
fir; or, in judging that I could find a squirrel in
his hammock up aloft when I see a plateful of
nibbled nut-shells under the tall larch, gay with
its tender pink blossoms; or, could I pursue the
brook that lurks reedily among the trees, I might
discover that eccentric angler, the heron, sitting
on his nest, with his two legs hanging through,
like a wooden-legged midshipman up in a man-of-