s of about that substance
of which the fingers can make fine "tees" for golfing. This is the
precise composition of earth and dampness underfoot most sympathetic to
the spine, the knee sockets, the muscles, tendons, ligaments of limb,
back, neck, breast and abdomen, and the spirit of locomotion in the
ancient exercise of walking. On this day the protruding stones have
been washed bald in the road; the lines and marks of drainage are still
clearly, freshly defined in the soil; in the gutters light-coloured
sand has risen to the surface with the dark moist soil in a grained
effect not unlike marbled chocolate cake; and clean, sweet gravel is
laid bare here and there in the wagon ruts. This is the chosen time
for the nerves and senses. On such a day the whole world greets one
cleansed and having on a fresh bib-and-tucker. It is a conscious
pleasure to have eyes. It is as if one long near-sighted without
knowing it had suddenly been fitted with the proper spectacles. It is
sweet to have olfactories. Whoso hath lungs, let him breathe. Man was
made to rejoice!

How green, on such a day, are the greens; the distant purples how
purple! The stone walls are cool. The great canvas of the sky has
been but newly brushed in, as if by some modern landscape painter (the
tube colours seem yet hardly dry); the technique, the brush-marks, show
in the unutterably soft, warm-white clouds; or, like a puff of
beaten-egg white, wells above that orchard hill. Higher up, thinly
touched across the blue, a great sweep of downy, swan breast-breast
feathers spreads. But not one canvas is this sky; ceaselessly it
changes with the minutes. To observe is to walk through an endless
gallery of countless pictures. It is alone a life-study. Now the wind
has blown it clear as blue limpidness; now scattered flakes appear; now
it is deep blue; now pale; now it tinges darkly; now it is a layer of
cream. Again, it breaks into shapes--decorative shapes, odd shapes,
lovely shapes, shapes always fresh. Its innovations are unflagging,
inexhaustable. Always art, its genius is infinite.

One must go a journey to discover how vast the sky really is, and the
world. To mount, bending forward, up by a long, tree-walled ascent
from some valley, and come upon this spectacular sight--the fair globe
that man inhabits lying away before one like a gigantic physical map, a
map in relief, cunningly painted in the colours of nature, laid off by
woods and orc