e reapers in it--there could be seen a slope divided into squares
of varied grain. This on the left of the fertile undulation was a
maize colour, which, when the sunlight touched it, seemed to have a
fleeting hue of purple somewhere within. There is no purple in ripe
wheat visible to direct and considering vision; look for it
specially, and it will not be seen. Purple forms no part of any
separate wheat-ear or straw; brown and yellow in the ear, yellow in
the upper part of the straw, and still green towards the earth. But
when the distant beams of sunlight travelling over the hill swept
through the rich ripe grain, for a moment there was a sense of
purple on the retina. Beyond this square was a pale gold piece, and
then one where the reapers had worked hard, and the shocks stood in
diagonal rows; this was a bronze, or brown and bronze, and beside it
was a green of clover.

Farther on, the different green of the hill turf, and white sheep,
feeding in an extended crescent, the bow of the crescent gradually
descending the sward. The hills of themselves beautiful, and
possessing views which are their property and belong to them--a
twofold value. The woods on the lower slopes full of tall brake
fern, and holding in their shadowy depths the spirit of old time. In
the woods it is still the past, and the noisy mechanic present of
this manufacturing century has no place. Enter in among the
round-boled beeches which the squirrels rush up, twining round like
ivy in ascent, where they nibble the beech-nuts forty feet aloft,
and let the husks drop to your feet; where the wood-pigeon sits and
does not move, safe in the height and thickness of the spray. There
are jew-berries or dew-berries on a bramble-bush, which grows where
the sunlight and rain fall direct to the ground, unchecked by
boughs. They are full of the juice of autumn, black, rich,
vine-like, taken fresh from the prickly bough. Low down in the
hollow is a marshy spot, sedge-grown, and in the sedge lie yellow
leaves of willow already fallen. Here in the later months will come
a woodcock or two, with feathers so brown and leaf-like of hue and
markings that the plumage might have been printed in colours from
brown leaves of beech. No springes are set for the woodcocks now,
but the markings are the same on the feathers as centuries since;
the brown beech-leaves lie in the dry hollows the year through just
as they did then; the large dew-berries are as rich; and the nuts as