n the
court of a City thoroughfare.

Rapt and absorbed in discount and dollars, in bills and merchandise, the
over-strung mind deems itself all--the body is forgotten, the physical
body, which is subject to growth and change, just as the plants and the
very grass of the field. But there is a subtle connection between the
physical man and the great nature which comes pressing up so closely to
the metropolis. He still depends in the nineteenth century, as in the
dim ages before the Pyramids, upon this tiny yellow grain here, rubbed
out from the ear of wheat. The clever mechanism of the locomotive which
bears him to and fro, week after week and month after month, from home
to office and from office home, has not rendered him in the least degree
independent of this.

But it is no wonder that these things are forgotten in the daily
struggle of London. And if the merchant spares an abstracted glance from
the morning or evening newspaper out upon the fields from the carriage
window, the furrows of the field can have but little meaning. Each
looks to him exactly alike. To the farmers and the labourer such and
such a furrow marks an acre and has its bearing, but to the passing
glance it is not so. The work in the field is so slow; the passenger by
rail sees, as it seems to him, nothing going on; the corn may sow itself
almost for all that is noteworthy in apparent labour.

Thus it happens that, although the cornfields and the meadows come so
closely up to the offices and warehouses of mighty London, there is a
line and mark in the minds of men between them; the man of merchandise
does not see what the man of the fields sees, though both may pass the
same acres every morning. It is inevitable that it should be so. It is
easy in London to forget that it is midsummer, till, going some day into
Covent Garden Market, you see baskets of the cornflower, or blue-bottle
as it is called in the country, ticketed "Corinne," and offered for
sale. The lovely azure of the flower recalls the scene where it was
first gathered long since at the edge of the wheat.

By the copse here now the teazles lift their spiny heads high in the
hedge, the young nuts are browning, the wild mints flowering on the
shores of the ditch, and the reapers are cutting ceaselessly at the ripe
corn. The larks have brought their loves to a happy conclusion. Besides
them the wheat in its day has sheltered many other creatures--both
animals and birds.

Hares raced ab