Sounds of merry laughter, and the 'knock, knock' of the
hockey-sticks arise. Ladies are gracefully gliding hither and
thither. Dancing-parties are formed, and thus among friends the
short winter's day passes too soon, and sunset is at hand. But how
beautiful that sunset! Under the level beams of the sun the ice
assumes a delicate rosy hue; yonder the white snow-covered hills to
the eastward are rosy too. Above them the misty vapour thickening in
the sky turns to the dull red the shepherd knows to mean another
frost and another fine day. Westwards where the disc has just gone
down, the white ridges of the hills stand out for the moment sharp
against the sky, as if cut by the graver's tool. Then the vapours
thicken; then, too, behind them, and slowly, the night falls.

Come back again in a few hours' time. The laugh is still, the noise
has fled, and the first sound of the skate on the black ice seems
almost a desecration. Shadows stretch out and cover the once
gleaming surface. But through the bare boughs of the great oak
yonder the moon--almost full--looks athwart the lake, and will soon
be high in the sky.

MARLBOROUGH FOREST

The great painter, Autumn, has just touched with the tip of his
brush a branch of the beech-tree, here and there leaving an orange
spot, and the green acorns are tinged with a faint yellow. The
hedges, perfect mines of beauty, look almost red from a distance, so
innumerable are the peggles.[1] Let not the modern Goths destroy our
hedges, so typical of an English landscape, so full of all that can
delight the eye and please the mind. Spare them, if only for the
sake of the 'days when we went gipsying--a long time ago'; spare
them for the children to gather the flowers of May and the
blackberries of September.

[1] A Wiltshire name for hawthorn-berries.

When the orange spot glows upon the beech, then the nuts are ripe,
and the hawthorn-bushes are hung with festoons of the buff-coloured,
heart-shaped leaves of a once-green creeper. That 'deepe and
enclosed country of Northe Wiltes,' which old Clarendon, in his
famous 'Civill Warre,' says the troops of King Charles had so much
difficulty to hurry through, is pleasant to those who can linger by
the wayside and the copse, and do not fear to hear the ordnance
make the 'woods ring again,' though to this day a rusty old
cannon-ball may sometimes be found under the dead brown leaves of
Aldbourne Chase, where the skirmish took place before