adow, and thence turning to the
left on to a path through the mowing grass, which was thick and very
tall, led on till we came to the river above the weir and its mill. There
we had a delightful swim in the broad piece of water above the lock,
where the river looked much bigger than its natural size from its being
dammed up by the weir.

"Now we are in a fit mood for dinner," said Dick, when we had dressed and
were going through the grass again; "and certainly of all the cheerful
meals in the year, this one of haysel is the cheerfullest; not even
excepting the corn-harvest feast; for then the year is beginning to fail,
and one cannot help having a feeling behind all the gaiety, of the coming
of the dark days, and the shorn fields and empty gardens; and the spring
is almost too far off to look forward to. It is, then, in the autumn,
when one almost believes in death."

"How strangely you talk," said I, "of such a constantly recurring and
consequently commonplace matter as the sequence of the seasons." And
indeed these people were like children about such things, and had what
seemed to me a quite exaggerated interest in the weather, a fine day, a
dark night, or a brilliant one, and the like.

"Strangely?" said he. "Is it strange to sympathise with the year and its
gains and losses?"

"At any rate," said I, "if you look upon the course of the year as a
beautiful and interesting drama, which is what I think you do, you should
be as much pleased and interested with the winter and its trouble and
pain as with this wonderful summer luxury."

"And am I not?" said Dick, rather warmly; "only I can't look upon it as
if I were sitting in a theatre seeing the play going on before me, myself
taking no part of it. It is difficult," said he, smiling
good-humouredly, "for a non-literary man like me to explain myself
properly, like that dear girl Ellen would; but I mean that I am part of
it all, and feel the pain as well as the pleasure in my own person. It
is not done for me by somebody else, merely that I may eat and drink and
sleep; but I myself do my share of it."

In his way also, as Ellen in hers, I could see that Dick had that
passionate love of the earth which was common to but few people at least,
in the days I knew; in which the prevailing feeling amongst intellectual
persons was a kind of sour distaste for the changing drama of the year,
for the life of earth and its dealings with men. Indeed, in those days
it was