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 And then she came to a hedge—a hedge of gorse, and barberry, and sweet-brier high over her head; and the gorse was in bright yellow blossom, the barberry and brier were in bright red fruit. In loops and festoons and sprays their brilliance leapt out naked upon the full soft blue of the sky, and a great black-and-crimson butterfly hovered about them. . . . Talk of colour!

Mrs. Nye could not get past this hedge for a long time. She had brought a little lunch with her, and she sat down by the roadside and ate it with her eyes on the hedge all the while, “so as to save time. I just want to get my heyes soaked in all them good warm hips an’ fuzz,” she said to herself. And when at last she did manage to walk on, it was still into fresh delight; for in a little flat enclosure at the foot of the hills, there now appeared three peach-trees, late-bearing peach-trees of the golden-fleshed variety, and their crop had not yet been gathered. Mrs. Nye stood before them fairly transfixed. She had never seen peaches growing at all before; she had only seen them laid on cotton-wool within shop windows.

“Ain’t they lovely, oh, ain’t they strokeable?” she said. “Talk o’ yaller-an’-red, these be rosy an’ primrosy; an’ did ever you see any ripeness look more round?”

And now she came to a plantation of oaks, and the leaves were changing: next, the road skirted a paddock, and in the paddock, as well as Antipodean blue-gums, stood one or two English elms, changing too! and the grass beneath them was all green from the rains of March—almost green enough to fit it for English grass, if one excused it