."

"Are you going to paint, Uncle?"

"I am."

"What?"

"Oh, just lines and circles."

Jeremy paused, standing for a moment, and looked puzzled. Then he said:

"Do you like babies, Uncle Samuel?"

"No, I do not."

"Not even Barbara?"

"No--certainly not."

"I don't, too... Why don't you paint cows and houses like other people,
Uncle Samuel? I heard Father say once that he never knew what your
pictures meant."

"That's why I paint them."

"Why?"

"So that your father shan't know what they mean."

Although he did not understand this any more than he understood his
uncle, Jeremy was pleased with this conversation. It had been, somehow,
in tone with the place and the hour; it had conveyed to him in some
strange fashion that his uncle cared for all of this rather as he
himself cared. Oh! he liked Uncle Samuel!

He had hoped that he might have sat on the box next to Jim, but that
place was now piled up with luggage, so he was squeezed in between his
mother and Mrs. Patcham, with Hamlet, very uncomfortable, between his
knees. They drove off down the high road, the hot smell of the grass
came to his nostrils, the sun blazed down upon them, turning the path
before them into gleaming steel, and the high Glebeshire hedges, covered
with thin powder, rose on both sides above them, breaking once and again
to show the folding valleys, and the faint blue hills, and the heavy,
dark trees with their thick, black shadows staining the grass.

The cows were clustered sleeping wherever they could find shadow;
faintly sheep-bells tinkled in the distance, and now and then a stream,
like broken glass, floated, cried, and was gone. They drove into a dark
wood, and the sun scattered through the trees in pieces of gold and
shadowy streams of arrowed light. The birds were singing, and whenever
the hoofs of the horses and the wheels turned onto soft moss or lines of
grass, in the sudden silence the air was filled with birds' voices. That
proved that it must now be turning to the evening of the day; the sun
was not very high above the wood, and the sea of blue was invaded by a
high galleon of cloud that hovered with spreading sail, catching gold
into its heart as it moved. They left the wood, crossed the River Garth,
and came out on to moorland. Here, for the first time, Jeremy smelt the
sea; the lanes had been hot, but here the wind blew across the moor,
with the smell of sea-pinks and sea-gulls in it. The grass was short
and