High above me, here and there upon the road, stand oast-houses, with their conical roofs ruddy against the sky, and over them the newly painted white cowls point eastward, and in their whiteness seem to have been set as a signal to say that it is the west wind after frost that has made the world what it is; they point out a road which, if I could follow it, would lead to the very court of mind and beauty, yonder, afar off, where the wind and the heron and the wild ducks are going. There I might learn to realise the long, joyous curves in which thought and action and life itself sweep onward to their triumphs....

But I know well that long hopes and wide, vaulting thoughts are not usually nourished by lane and footpath and highway, on and on; and probably I shall stop at “The Black Horse” over the next hill, where a man may always lighten his burden on a Tuesday by hearing the price of beasts.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE METAMORPHOSIS

As the sun rose I watched a proud ash tree shedding its leaves after a night of frost. It let them go by threes and tens and twenties; very rarely, with little intervals, only one at a time; once or twice a hundred in one flight. Leaflet—for they fall by leaflets—and stalk twirled through the windless air as if they would have liked to fall not quite so rapidly as their companions to that brown and shining and oblivious carpet below. A gentle wind arose from the north and the leaves all went sloping in larger companies to the ground—falling, falling, whispering as they joined the fallen, they fell for a longer time than a poppy spends in opening and shedding its husk in June. But soon only two leaves were left vibrating. In a little while they also, both together, make the leap, twinkling for a short space and then shadowed and lastly bright and silent on the grass. Then the tree stood up entirely bereaved and without a voice, in the silver light of the morning that was still young, and wrote once more its grief in complicated scribble upon a sky of intolerably lustrous pearl.

But by the next day the grief was healed, for what was clearest about its branches was the swiftness and downward rushing and curving flight which they suggested—as of birds stooping in lines to their tree-top nests—as of divers at the moment when their descent mingles with their ascent—as of winged Greek gods and goddesses slanting to earth with wave-like breasts.

CHAPTER XXV
EARTH CHILDREN

I

Their house is a small russet cave of three dim compartments—part of a farmhouse, the rest having fallen to ruin, and from human hands to the starlings, the sparrows, and the rats. No one will live in it again. Inside, it is held together by the solid poetry of their lives, by gay-coloured, cheerful, tradesmen’s pictures of well-dressed children and blooming horsewomen, and the dogs of gentlemen, memorial cards of the dead, a few photographs, some picture post-cards pasted over flaws in the wall, and the worn furniture of several disconnected generations. The old man’s tools in the kitchen are noble—the heavy wrought iron, two-toothed hoe, that falls pleasantly upon the hard clay and splits it without effort and without jarring the hand, its ash handle worn thin where his hand has glided at work, a hand that nothing will wear smooth; the glittering, yellow handled spades and forks; the disused shovel with which he boasts regretfully that he could dig his garden when he lived on deep loam in a richer country than this; and still the useless “hop-idgit” of six tynes—the Sussex “shim”—which he retains to remind others, and perhaps himself, that he was a farmer once. He had twenty or thirty acres and a few cows. The cows all died in one year and he became a labourer.