we had sheep's milk butter. No one who has had
it in Greece would be without it at home if he could help it. You
weaned the lambs at Philip and Jacob, he says, if you wanted any milk
from the ewe. Lastly, he grew saffron, which he pared between the two
St. Mary's days. To pare is to strip the soil with a breast-plow.
The two St. Mary's days were July 22 and August 15, which would be a
pretty good time to plant saffron.

We also, in my country, date our operations by holy days, long after
the holy men have ceased to be commemorated. Who knows St. Gregory's
Day? It is March 12. Marrowfat peas go into the drill:

Sow runcivals timely, and all that is grey;
But sow not the white till St. Gregory's Day.

I will undertake that half a dozen old hands round about my house
follow out this rule in its entirety.

FLOWER OF THE FIELD

A county inquiry took me, one day last summer, deeply into the Plain,
up and over a rutty track which my driver will have cause to remember.
An uncommonly large hawk soaring over his prey, and so near the ground
that I could see the light through his ragged plumes, a hare limping
through the bents, further off a crawling flock bustling after
shepherd and dog, were all the living things I saw. The ground was
iron, the colour of what had once been herbage a glaring brown. Of the
flowers none but the hardiest had outlived the visitation of the sun.
I saw rest-harrow which has a root like whipcord, and the flat thistle
which thrives in dust. The harebells floated no more, the discs of the
scabious were shrivelled husks; ladies' bedstraw was straw indeed, but
not for ladies' uses. Three miles away from anywhere we came upon a
clump of dusty sycamores whose leaves were spotted and beginning to
fall; beyond them was a squat row of flint and brick bungalows, the
goal of our quest. There were three tenements, of which two were
empty. In the third lives the shepherd who had called me up to
consider his circumstances.

There was thunder about, though not visibly; a day both airless and
pitiless; one of those days when you feel that the unseen powers are
conspiring against your peace. A naked sun from a naked sky stared
down upon a naked earth. It seemed to me that the hawk had been a
figure of more than himself and his purpose; I saw him as Homer's
people saw their eagles. Just as he hung aloft so hung the sun, intent
upon the life of our cowering ball. Not elsewhere in England have I
seen s