of north-east
winds and heavy snow that had brought April to a close. The change was
incredible. There, in the roads that ran through the oakwoods and hazel
copses, it was the heat of summer. The birds had drawn new valentines. A
cock chaffinch, gayest of suitors, danced round his demure hen in the
roadway, careless of any pedestrian in that deep country; wrens crept
like mice among the stubs of the hedge; the grass by the roadside and
the ditch was lighted with primroses. A narrow copse of cut hazel,
bordering the road on the Sussex boundary, was a carpet of primroses,
anemones, milkmaids, and dog violets; spires of purple orchids stood
above shining celandines; there could have been nothing more brilliant
in a garden. On the hedge-bank a hen pheasant rustled through the
undergrowth, caught sight of me, crept to a rabbit-scratch and crouched
on the brown earth within a yard of my hand; for the birds are tamer in
the Fold Country than beyond it. Above other hedge-banks, in other
copses, the cuckoos called all that morning, from Sussex to Surrey, over
the border road.

Two of the Fold Country farmhouses by that road, framed in that sunny
setting, belong to the memories of a Surrey May. One is a timbered house
twenty yards in Sussex, with white curtains and flower-pots behind its
diamond-paned lattices, and clumps of primroses growing about stone
causeways up to the very door. The other is Pallinghurst farm, a mile
further on the road, whose long, lichened roofs shelter red-tiled walls
and masses of ivy round a white doorway; the garden is a cluster of
gnarled apple-trees, and over it and about the tall farm chimneys, when
I saw it that morning, flew the first swallows of the year. But it was
not the swallows that made summer that May-day. Beyond Alfold, on the
road that runs out of Sidney Wood up to Dunsfold Common, there are
coppices of thick undergrowth, set about orchards of grey-lichened
fruit-trees and stretches of low cut hazel sheeted with primroses. There
I heard the first nightingale of the year, a single jet of song as the
brown tail flickered in the covert; a hundred yards further down the
road there were three singing together; Dunsfold Common came in a burst
of yellow gorse, and the song of a nightingale thrilled up from the
gorse; another bird, beyond Dunsfold, sang high in the hedgerow in full
sunlight. That is a Dunsfold lane, for me; a wild plum-tree branching
out of the hedge dressed with the whitest of