ging with the misty air; the cattle browsing in the
lingering golden stillness; not a breath to fan the blue smoke of the
weed-fires--and in the fields no one moving--who would disturb such
mellow peace? And Winter! The long spaces, the long dark; and yet--and
yet, what delicate loveliness of twig tracery; what blur of rose and
brown and purple caught in the bare boughs and in the early sunset sky!
What sharp dark flights of birds in the gray-white firmament! Who cared
what season held in its arms this land that had bred them all!

Not wonderful that into the veins of those who nursed it, tending,
watching its perpetual fertility, should be distilled a love so deep and
subtle that they could not bear to leave it, to abandon its hills, and
greenness, and bird-songs, and all the impress of their forefathers
throughout the ages.

Like so many of his fellows--cultured moderns, alien to the larger forms
of patriotism, that rich liquor brewed of maps and figures, commercial
profit, and high-cockalorum, which served so perfectly to swell smaller
heads--Felix had a love of his native land resembling love for a woman, a
kind of sensuous chivalry, a passion based on her charm, on her
tranquillity, on the power she had to draw him into her embrace, to make
him feel that he had come from her, from her alone, and into her alone
was going back. And this green parcel of his native land, from which the
half of his blood came, and that the dearest half, had a potency over his
spirit that he might well be ashamed of in days when the true Briton was
a town-bred creature with a foot of fancy in all four corners of the
globe. There was ever to him a special flavor about the elm-girt fields,
the flowery coppices, of this country of the old Moretons, a special
fascination in its full, white-clouded skies, its grass-edged roads, its
pied and creamy cattle, and the blue-green loom of the Malvern hills. If
God walked anywhere for him, it was surely here. Sentiment! Without
sentiment, without that love, each for his own corner, 'the Land' was
lost indeed! Not if all Becket blew trumpets till kingdom came, would
'the Land' be reformed, if they lost sight of that! To fortify men in
love for their motherland, to see that insecurity, grinding poverty,
interference, petty tyranny, could no longer undermine that love--this
was to be, surely must be, done! Monotony? Was that cry true? What
work now performed by humble men was less monotonou