lways at night-time a great
lamp shone from it that hung in the spire midway between the roof of the
church and the cross at the top of the spire. The Abbey where we built
the Church was not girt by stone walls, but by a circle of poplar trees,
and whenever a wind passed over them, were it ever so little a breath, it
set them all a-ripple; and when the wind was high, they bowed and swayed
very low, and the wind, as it lifted the leaves, and showed their silvery
white sides, or as again in the lulls of it, it let them drop, kept on
changing the trees from green to white, and white to green; moreover,
through the boughs and trunks of the poplars, we caught glimpses of the
great golden corn sea, waving, waving, waving for leagues and leagues;
and among the corn grew burning scarlet poppies, and blue corn-flowers;
and the corn-flowers were so blue, that they gleamed, and seemed to burn
with a steady light, as they grew beside the poppies among the gold of
the wheat. Through the corn sea ran a blue river, and always green
meadows and lines of tall poplars followed its windings. The old Church
had been burned, and that was the reason why the monks caused me to build
the new one; the buildings of the Abbey were built at the same time as
the burned-down Church, more than a hundred years before I was born, and
they were on the north side of the Church, and joined to it by a cloister
of round arches, and in the midst of the cloister was a lawn, and in the
midst of that lawn, a fountain of marble, carved round about with flowers
and strange beasts, and at the edge of the lawn, near the round arches,
were a great many sun-flowers that were all in blossom on that autumn
day, and up many of the pillars of the cloister crept passion-flowers and
roses. Then farther from the Church, and past the cloister and its
buildings, were many detached buildings, and a great garden round them,
all within the circle of the poplar trees; in the garden were trellises
covered over with roses, and convolvolus, and the great-leaved fiery
nasturium; and specially all along by the poplar trees were there
trellises, but on these grew nothing but deep crimson roses; the
hollyhocks too were all out in blossom at that time, great spires of
pink, and orange, and red, and white, with their soft, downy leaves. I
said that nothing grew on the trellises by the poplars but crimson roses,
but I was not quite right, for in many places the wild flowers had crept
in