After that there was a little talk of June peas and lettuce and the vicious propensities of cut worms; and then Mrs. Neal went back to her gardening, while Archibald swung himself over a stone wall into the road, over another wall into a clover field, and made his leisurely way toward the most sketchable of willow-fringed brooks.
For a while he made pretense of working, but even the brook laughed at the faint-heartedness of his efforts and the drooping willow boughs quivered with mirth and the sunlight stealing through the green leaves danced over his canvas and mocked at its futility.
“Work? In June?” sang a bird in the willows and, at the idea, all the summer world laughed with the brook.
“Smell!” whispered the clover sea, billowing away from the tree shadows where he sat.
“Feel!” crooned the breeze, touching his cheek with cool, caressing fingers.
“Look!” shouted the sun, driving shadow-throwing clouds across the low meadowland and up the far blue hills.
“Listen!” lilted the bird in the branches.
Archibald gave up the struggle. Why dabble with paints? Loafing was more glorious business.
“You’re quite right about it,” he said cheerfully to the derisive brook. “I’m a punk painter, but the Lord knew his business when he sketched in June. Come along and show me more of the canvas.”
He set off across the meadow, the brook chuckling its sunlit way beside him and together they wandered down the Valley. A companionable brook it was, full of surprises and whimsies as a woman, running quietly through brown, sun-warmed shallows, working itself into a fury against solid, unyielding stones, dreaming under overhanging elders, glooming among thick clustering pine trees, dashing noisily, recklessly, down steep slopes.