apple-blossom. Traces of her hand are to be seen on the weir beside
the ruined mill; and even the canal, along which the barges come and
go, has a great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured face.
Never was velvet on a monarch's robe so gorgeous as the green mosses
that be-ruff the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants on
them and goes. The old road out towards the common, and the hoary
dikes that might have been built in the reign of Alfred, have not been
forgotten by the generous adorning season; for every fissure has its
mossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are washed by the
loveliest gray-green lichens in the world, and the large loose stones
lying on the ground have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossy
coverings. Some of these have not been disturbed for a century.
Summer has adorned my village as gaily, and taken as much pleasure in
the task, as the people of old, when Elizabeth was queen, took in the
adornment of the May-pole against a summer festival. And, just think,
not only Dreamthorp, but every English village she has made beautiful
after one fashion or another--making vivid green the hill slope on
which straggling white Welsh hamlets hang right opposite the sea;
drowning in apple-blossom the red Sussex ones in the fat valley. And
think, once more, every spear of grass in England she has touched with
a livelier green; the crest of every bird she has burnished; every old
wall between the four seas has received her mossy and licheny
attentions; every nook in every forest she has sown with pale flowers,
every marsh she has dashed with the fires of the marigold. And in the
wonderful night the moon knows, she hangs--the planet on which so many
millions of us fight, and sin, and agonise, and die--a sphere of
glow-worm light.

Having discoursed so long about Dreamthorp, it is but fair that I
should now introduce you to her lions. These are, for the most part,