Yonder the road curves languidly between hedges and broad fringes of green, and along it an old man guides the cattle in to afternoon milking. They linger to crop the wayside grass and he waits, but suddenly resumes his walk and they obey, now hastening with tight udders and looking from side to side. They turn under the archway of a ruined abbey, and low as if they enjoy the reverberation, and disappear. I never see them again; but the ease, the remoteness, the colour of the red cattle in the green road, the slowness of the old cowman, the timelessness of that gradual movement under the fourteenth century arch, never vanish.
Of such things the day is made, not of milestones and antiquities. Isolated, rapt from the earth, perhaps, by the very fatigue which at the end restores us to it forcibly, the mind goes on seeing and remembering these things.
Here the cattle stand at the edge of a pond and the tench swim slowly above the weeds amongst them as they stand. The sun strikes down upon the glassy water, but cannot take away the coolness of the reeds about the margin. Under the one oak in the meadow above, the farmer sits with his dog, so still that the dabchick does not dive and the water vole nibbles the reed, making a small sound, the only one.
There five little girls play the lovers’ game on a green in front of their cottages. One of them kneels down and cries quietly; the others hold hands and circle round her, singing—
“Poor Mary sits a-weeping, a-weeping, a-weeping,
Poor Mary sits a-weeping, by the bright shining shore.
“Oh tell us what you’re weeping for, weeping for, weeping for,
Oh tell us what you’re weeping for, by the bright shining shore.”
Then the little “poor Mary,” with her face still in her apron, takes up the singing, the others still moving round her:—