Stoats with reddish-brown backs and yellow bellies may often be seen hunting the rabbits, and the little weasels may sometimes be drawn out of their holes in the walls if one makes a squeaking noise with the lips. Stoats usually hunt singly, weasels in packs and pairs.
But we must leave the woods, for the evening shadows are lengthening and the "golden evening brightens in the west." It is time to go up to the cornfields on the hill and see the sun set. I have said that there is no path through this wood; it is sacred to foxes. They are not here now, however; they will not be back till all the corn is cut. The wheatfields are their summer quarters.
It is no easy matter to get out of a tangled wood in August. The stinging-nettles are seven feet high in places; we must hold our hands high above our heads and plough our way through them. When we finally emerge we are covered from head to foot with large prickly burrs from the seeding burdocks, as well as with the small round burrs of the goose-grass. Then
"On and up where nature's heart
Beats strong amid the hills."
As we pass onwards over the cornfields towards a piece of high ground from which it is our wont to watch the sun set, a silvery half-moon peeps out between the clouds. In the north-west the range of limestone hills is already tinged with purple. In the highest heaven are bars of distant cloud, so motionless that they appear to be sailing slowly against the wind. Lower down, dusky, smoke-like clouds, tinged here and there with a rosy hue, are flying rapidly onwards, ever onwards, in the sky. Later on the higher clouds will turn deep red, whilst brighter and brighter will glow the moon.
Yonder, twenty-five miles away, the old White Horse is just visible upon the distant chalk downs. Overhead the sky has the deep blue of mazarine, but westwards and south-west the colour is light olive green, gradually changing to an intensely bright yellow. Heavy banks of clouds are slowly rising in the south-west; the bleating of sheep at the ancient homestead half a mile away is the only sound to be heard. As the sun goes down to-night it resembles a great ship on fire amidst the breakers on a rockbound coast; for the western sky is dashed with fleecy clouds, like the spray that beats against the chalk cliffs on the shore of the mighty Atlantic; and amid the last plunges of the doomed vessel the spray is tinged redder and redder, ere with her human cargo she disappears amid the surf. But no sooner has she sunk into the abyss than the foam and the fierce breakers die away, and a wondrous calm broods over all things. In twenty minutes' time nothing is left in the western sky but a tiny bar of golden cloud that cannot yet quite die away, reminding me, as I still thought about the burning ship and her ill-fated crew, of
"the golden key
Which opes the palace of Eternity."
But eastwards, above the old legendary White Horse, the "Empress of the Night," serene and proudly pale, is driving her car across the darkening skies.