Yonder, up a steep field, goes a boy birdnesting in a double hedge, stooping to the nettles for the white-throat’s eggs, straining high among the hawthorns for a dove’s. He does not hasten. Now and then he calls “cuckoo,” not a timorous note, but lusty like the bird’s own: and now he lies down to suck a thrush’s egg. He will not take the robin’s eggs, “or I shall get my arm broken,” he says. A cruel game, but so long as he loves it with all his heart perhaps it is forgiven him, and in a few years he will never again go slowly up that field, forgetful of schoolmaster, father and mother and the greatness of man.
At noon there is a hamlet in front. On one side of it the church thrusts a golden weathercock high into the blue sky, and with his proud and jolly head uplifted towards the north the bird flames and exults; on the other side, tall beeches give out the sleepy noise of rooks. Straight ahead “The White Hart,” a white inn with heavy, overhanging thatch, divides the road in two. Those white walls can never cease to glow; they have persuaded the sun to sleep under those eaves for ever like the carter on the bench. The sign-board hangs silent, but the sign has melted away. A waggon stands by the door; the waggoner holds a chestnut mare with one hand, with the other he slowly tilts the glittering tankard and shows all of his brown throat throbbing; the hostess watches.
The low white kitchen is cut in two by a tall, semi-circular settle, to which the hostess returns, and with a round elm table between her and the fire she lops fine greens into a pail. A tenanted fireplace is better than a cold one on any day of the year, and it is cool in the window seat between the ale and the wind. Outside lies the little road, waiting for me. And now we go on together, the road having still the advantage of me, though it has poured no libation.
All through the long afternoon that land offers symbols of peace, security and everlastingness. Tall hedges half hidden in a rising tide of long, starry herbage, ponds where the probing carp make the lily leaves rise and flap, wide meadows where the cows wander half a mile an hour, vast green cumulus clouds with round summits here and there disclosing infinite receding glooms of blue—these with their continual presence store the mind, giving it not only the poignant joy in which half consciously we know that never again shall we be just here and thus, but the joy, too, of knowing that we take these things along with us to the end—
“Then whate’er
Poor laws divide the public year,
Whose revolutions wait upon
The wild turns of the wanton sun;
There all the year is love’s long spring,
There all the year love’s nightingales shall sit and sing.”