Twenty-five years ago I went into a camera obscura, where you see
miniature men and women, coloured photographs alive and moving, trees
waving, now and then dogs crossing the bright sun picture. I was only
there a few moments, and I have never been in one since, and yet so
inexplicable a thing is memory, the picture stands before me now clear as
if it were painted and tangible. So many millions of pictures have come
and gone upon the retina, and yet I can single out this one in an
instant, and take it down as you would a book from a shelf. The millions
of coloured etchings that have fixed themselves there in the course of
those years are all in due order in the portfolio of the mind, and yet
they cannot occupy the space of a pin's point. They have neither length,
breadth, nor thickness, none of the qualifications of mathematical
substance, and yet they must in some way be a species of matter. The fact
indicates the possibility of still more subtle existences. Now I wish I
could put before you a coloured, living, moving picture, like that of the
camera obscura, of some other wheat-fields at a sunnier time. They were
painted on the surface of a plain, set round about with a margin of green
downs. They were large enough to have the charm of vague, indefinite
extension, and yet all could be distinctly seen. Large squares of green
corn that was absorbing its yellow from the sunlight; chess squares,
irregularly placed, of brown furrows; others of rich blood-red trifolium;
others of scarlet sainfoin and blue lucerne, gardens of scarlet poppies
here and there. Not all of these, of course, at once, but they followed
so quickly in the summer days that they seemed to be one and the same
pictures, and had you painted them altogether on the same canvas,
together with ripe wheat, they would not have seemed out of place. Never
was such brilliant colour; it was chalk there, and on chalk the colours
are always clearer, the poppies deeper, the yellow mustard and charlock a
keener yellow; the air, too, is pellucid. Waggons going along the tracks;
men and women hoeing; ricks of last year still among clumps of trees,