foliage as they used to do in their own homes. The young alders and the
hawthorn hedges are greening, but it will be a fortnight before we
can realise the beauty of that snow-white bloom, with its bitter-sweet
fragrance. The cuckoo-flower came this year before instead of after the
bird, they tell us, showing that even Nature, in these days of anarchy
and misrule, is capable of taking liberties with her own laws. There
is a fragrance of freshly turned earth in the air, and the rooks are
streaming out from the elms by the little church, and resting for a bit
in a group of plume-like yews. The last few days of warmth and sunshine
have inspired the birds, and as Francesca and I sit at our windows
breathing in the sweetness and freshness of the morning, there is a
concert of thrushes and blackbirds in the shrubberies. The little
birds furnish the chorus or the undertone of song, the hedge-sparrows,
redbreasts, and chaffinches, but the meistersingers 'call the tune,'
and lead the feathered orchestra with clear and certain notes. It is a
golden time for the minstrels, for nest-building is finished, and the
feeding of the younglings a good time yet in the future. We can see one
little brown lady hovering warm eggs under her breast, her bright eyes
peeping through a screen of leaves as she glances up at her singing
lord, pouring out his thanks for the morning sun. There is only a hint
of breeze, it might almost be the whisper of uncurling fern fronds, but
soft as it is, it stirs the branches here and there, and I know that it
is rocking hundreds of tiny cradles in the forest.

When I was always painting in those other days before I met Himself, one
might think my eyes would have been even keener to see beauty than
now, when my brushes are more seldom used; but it is not so. There is
something, deep hidden in my consciousness, that makes all loveliness
lovelier, that helps me to interpret it in a different and in a larger
sense. I have a feeling that I have been lifted out of the individual
and given my true place in the general scheme of the universe, and, in
some subtle way that I can hardly explain, I am more nearly related to
all things good, beautiful, and true than I was when I was wholly an
artist, and therefore less a woman. The bursting of the leaf-buds brings
me a tender thought of the one dear heart that gives me all its spring;
and whenever I see the smile of a child, a generous look, the flash of
sympathy in an eye, i