scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that nothing
escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each, although
I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh. They never
lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild flower it
feels a new thing. The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe so near to
us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the yellowhammers most,
whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the sky, has never faded
from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose
grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in flowers.

One yellowhammer sat on a branch of ash the livelong morning, still
singing in the sun; his bright head, his clean bright yellow, gaudy as
Spain, was drawn like a brush charged heavily with colour across the
retina, painting it deeply, for there on the eye's memory it endures,
though that was boyhood and this is manhood, still unchanged. The field--
Stewart's Mash--the very tree, young ash timber, the branch projecting
over the sward, I could make a map of them. Sometimes I think sun-painted
colours are brighter to me than to many, and more strongly affect the
nerves of the eye. Straw going by the road on a dusky winter's day seems
so pleasantly golden, the sheaves lying aslant at the top, and these
bundles of yellow tubes thrown up against the dark ivy on the opposite
wall. Tiles, red burned, or orange coated, the sea sometimes cleanly
definite, the shadows of trees in a thin wood where there is room for
shadows to form and fall; some such shadows are sharper than light, and
have a faint blue tint. Not only in summer but in cold winter, and not
only romantic things but plain matter-of-fact things, as a waggon freshly
painted red beside the wright's shop, stand out as if wet with colour and
delicately pencilled at the edges. It must be out of doors; nothing
indoors looks like this.