Dark starlings, greenfinch, gilded fly, glistening beetle, blue
butterfly, humble bee with scarf about his thick waist, add their moving
dots of colour to the surface. There is no design, no balance, nothing
like a pattern perfect on the right-hand side, and exactly equal on the
left-hand. Even trees which have some semblance of balance in form are
not really so, and as you walk round them so their outline changes.

Now the path approaches a stile set deep in thorns and brambles, and
hardly to be gained for curved hooks and prickles. But on the briars
June roses bloom, arches of flowers over nettles, burdock, and rushes in
the ditch beneath. Sweet roses--buds yet unrolled, white and conical;
roses half open and pink tinted; roses widespread, the petals curling
backwards on the hedge, abandoning their beauty to the sun. In the
pasture over the stile a roan cow feeds unmoved, calmly content,
gathering the grass with rough tongue. It is not only what you actually
see along the path, but what you remember to have seen, that gives it
its beauty.

From hence the path skirts the hedge enclosing a copse, part of which
had been cut in the winter, so that a few weeks since in spring the
bluebells could be seen, instead of being concealed by the ash branches
and the woodbine. Among them grew one with white bells, like a lily,
solitary in the midst of the azure throng. A "drive," or green lane
passing between the ash-stoles, went into the copse, with tufts of
tussocky grass on either side and rush bunches, till farther away the
overhanging branches, where the poles were uncut, hid its course.

Already the grass has hidden the ruts left by the timber carriages--the
last came by on May-day with ribbons of orange, red, and blue on the