h boughs; white meadow-sweet flowering on the shore of the ditch;
white clover, too, beside the gateway. As spring is azure and purple, so
midsummer is white, and autumn golden. Thus the coming out of the wheat
into ear is marked and welcomed with the purest colour.

But these, though the most prominent along the hedge, are not the only
flowers; the prevalent white is embroidered with other hues. The brown
feathers of a few reeds growing where the furrows empty the showers into
the ditch, wave above the corn. Among the leaves of mallow its mauve
petals are sheltered from the sun. On slender stalks the yellow
vetchling blooms, reaching ambitiously as tall as the lowest of the
brambles. Bird's-foot lotus, with red claws, is overtopped by the
grasses.

The elm has a fresh green--it has put forth its second or midsummer
shoot; the young leaves of the aspen are white, and the tree as the wind
touches it seems to turn grey. The furrows run to the ditch under the
reeds, the ditch declines to a little streamlet which winds all hidden
by willowherb and rush and flag, a mere trickle of water under
brooklime, away at the feet of the corn. In the shadow, deep down
beneath the crumbling bank which is only held up by the roots of the
grasses, is a forget-me-not with a tiny circlet of yellow in the centre
of its petals.

The coming of the ears of wheat forms an era and a date, a fixed point
in the story of the summer. It is then that, soon after dawn, the clear
sky assumes the delicate and yet luscious purple which seems to shine
through the usual atmosphere, as if its former blue became translucent
and an inner and ethereal light of colour was shown. As the sun rises
higher the brilliance of his rays overpowers it, and even at midsummer
it is but rarely seen.

The morning sky is often, too, charged with saffron, or the blue is
clear, but pale, and the sunrise might be watched for many mornings
without the appearance of this exquisite hue. Once seen, it will ever be
remembered. Upon the Downs in early autumn, as the vapours clear away,
the same colour occasionally gleams from the narrow openings of blue
sky. But at midsummer, above the opening wheatears, the heaven from the
east to the zenith is flushed with it.

At noonday, as the light breeze comes over, the wheat rustles the more
because the stalks are stiffening and swing from side to side from the
root instead of yielding up the stem. Stay now at every gateway and lean
over