through the elms of the rickyard, away from
the ridge of the distant Down, and then for the first hour of the day
the room was aglow. For quite two hundred years every visible sunrise
had shone in at that window more or less, as the season changed and
the sun rose to the north of east. Perhaps it was that sense of
ancient homeliness that caused Cicely, without knowing why, to steal
in there alone to dream, for nowhere else indoors could she have been
so far away from the world of to-day.

Left much to herself, she roamed along the hedgerow as now and then a
mild day came, soon after the birds had paired, and saw the
arrow-shaped, pointed leaves with black spots rising and unrolling at
the sides of the ditches. Many of these seemed to die away presently
without producing anything, but from some there pushed up a sharply
conical sheath, from which emerged the spadix of the arum with its
frill. Thrusting a stick into the loose earth of the bank, she found
the root, covered with a thick wrinkled skin which peeled easily and
left a white substance like a small potato. Some of the old women who
came into the kitchen used to talk about 'yarbs,' and she was told
that this was poisonous and ought not to be touched--the very reason
why she slipped into the dry ditch and dug it up. But she started with
a sense of guilt as she heard the slow rustle of a snake gliding along
the mound over the dead, dry leaves of last year.

In August, when the reapers began to call and ask for work, she found
the arum stalks, left alone without leaves, surrounded with berries,
some green, some ripening red. As the berries ripen, the stalk grows
weak and frequently falls prone of its own weight among the grasses.
This noisome fruit of clustering berries, like an ear of maize stained
red, they told her was 'snake's victuals,' and to be avoided; for,
bright as was its colour, it was only fit for a reptile's food.

She knew, too, where to find the first 'crazy Betties,' whose large
yellow flowers do not wait for the sun, but shine when the March wind
scatters king's ransoms over the fields. These are the marsh
marigolds: there were two places where she gathered them, one beside
the streamlet flowing through the 'Mash,' a meadow which was almost a
water-meadow; and the other inside a withy-bed. She pulled the
'cat's-tails,' as she learned to call the horse-tails, to see the stem
part at the joints; and when the mowing-grass began to grow long,
picked