might draw a stroke with a pencil, over the surface of the yellow
buttercups, and away above the hedge. Hart's-tongue fern, thick
with green, so green as to be thick with its colour, deep in the
ditch under the shady hazel boughs. White meadow-sweet lifting its
tiny florets, and black-flowered sedges. You must push through the
reed grass to find the sword-flags; the stout willow-herbs will not
be trampled down, but resist the foot like underwood. Pink lychnis
flowers behind the withy stoles, and little black moorhens swim
away, as you gather it, after their mother, who has dived under the
water-grass, and broken the smooth surface of the duckweed. Yellow
loosestrife is rising, thick comfrey stands at the very edge; the
sandpipers run where the shore is free from bushes. Back by the
underwood the prickly and repellent brambles will presently present
us with fruit. For the squirrels the nuts are forming, green
beechmast is there - green wedges under the spray; up in the oaks
the small knots, like bark rolled up in a dot, will be acorns.
Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is
shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis. As I write them, so these
things come - not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers
in the mowing-grass.

Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet
lady's bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-
bush. The broad repetition of the yellow clover is not to be
written; acre upon acre, and not one spot of green, as if all the
green had been planed away, leaving only the flowers to which the
bees come by the thousand from far and near. But one white campion
stands in the midst of the lake of yellow. The field is scented as
though a hundred hives of honey had been emptied on it. Along the
mound by it the bluebells are seeding, the hedge has been cut and