reak of
colour, for it is not made up of broad streaks. It is composed of
innumerable items of grass blade and flower, each in itself coloured and
different from its neighbour. Not one of these must be slurred over if
you wish to get the same effect.

Then there are drifting specks of colour which cannot be fixed.
Butterflies, white, parti-coloured, brown, and spotted, and light blue
flutter along beside the footpath; two white ones wheel about each
other, rising higher at every turn till they are lost and no more to be
distinguished against a shining white cloud. Large dark humble bees roam
slowly, and honey bees with more decided flight. Glistening beetles,
green and gold, run across the bare earth of the path, coming from one
crack in the dry ground and disappearing in the (to them) mighty chasm
of another.

Tiny green "hoppers"--odd creatures shaped something like the fancy
frogs of children's story-books--alight upon it after a spring, and
pausing a second, with another toss themselves as high as the highest
bennet (veritable elm-trees by comparison), to fall anywhere out of
sight in the grass. Reddish ants hurry over. Time is money; and their
business brooks no delay.

Bee-like flies of many stripes and parti-coloured robes face you,
suspended in the air with wings vibrating so swiftly as to be unseen;
then suddenly jerk themselves a few yards to recommence hovering. A
greenfinch rises with a yellow gleam and a sweet note from the grass,
and is off with something for his brood, or a starling, solitary now,
for his mate is in the nest, startled from his questing, goes straight
away.

Dark starlings, greenfinch, gilded fly, glistening beetle, blue
butterfly, humble bee with scarf about his thick waist, add their moving
dots of colour to the surface. There is no design, no balance, nothing
like a pattern perfect on the right-hand side, and exactly equal on the
left-hand. Even trees which have some semblance of balance in form are
not really so, and as you walk round them so their outline changes.

Now the path approaches a stile set deep in thorns and brambles, and
hardly to be gained for curved hooks and prickles. But on the briars
June roses bloom, arches of flowers over nettles, burdock, and rushes in
the ditch beneath. Sweet roses--buds yet unrolled, white and conical;
roses half open and pink tinted; roses widespread, the petals curling
backwards on the hedge, abandoning their beauty to the sun. In the
pa