The memorable features of this pleasant day’s gipsying were flowers, foliage, and the exceeding brightness of the sunshine.
At Malta and in Africa I have seen stronger lights and deeper shadows, but never in England before. The sky was cerulean, Italian, call it what you like, but it was very blue. The sunshine gave beauty and gladness to everything and every creature around us. Birds, butterflies, and shimmering four-winged metallic-tinted dragon-flies flew, floated, and revelled in it. It lay in patches on the trees, it lent a lighter crimson to the fields of clover, a brighter yellow to the golden buttercups; it changed the ox-eye daisies to glittering stars, and gave beauty-tints innumerable to seedling grasses and bronzy flowering docks.
Under the trees it was almost dark by contrast. So marked, indeed, was this contrast that when a beautiful young girl, in a dress of white and pink, came suddenly out of the shadow and stood in the sunshine, it appeared to us as if she had sprung from the earth itself, for till now she had been invisible.
Before we reached home a blue evening haze had fallen on all the wooded landscape, making distant trees mere shapes, but hardly marring the beauty of the wild flowers that grew on each side of our path and carpeted the woodlands and copses.
This was our last spring outing, and a happy one too. From this date I am to be a solitary gipsy.
Solitary, and yet not altogether so. My coachman is, I believe, a quiet and faithful fellow, and eke my valet too. Then have I not the companionship of Hurricane Bob, one of the grandest of a grand race of jetty-black Newfoundlands, whose coats have never been marred by a single curly hair?
Nay, more, have I not also my West Australian cockatoo to talk to me, to sing with me, and dance when I play? Come, I am not so badly off. Hurrah! then, for the road and a gipsy’s life in earnest.