Page:The Heart of England.djvu/118

 with tall, stout chimneys and steep, auburn roof, and green stonecrop frothing over its porch. In and out goes a rutted, grassy track, lined by decapitated and still-living remains of many ancient elms.

In the overhanging elm branches flicker the straws of the long-past harvest, and the spirits of summers and autumns long-past cling to grass and ponds and trees.

The walnut tree among the ricks is dead. Against its craggy bole rest the shafts of a noble, blue waggon that seems coeval with it; long ladders are thrust up among its branches; deep in the brittle herbage underneath it lean or lie broken wheels, a rude wooden roller, the lovely timber of an antique plough, a knotted and rusted chain harrow, and the vast wooden wedge of the snow-plough that cleared the roads when winters were still grim. In the soft, straight rain these things are a buried world, the skeletons of a fair-seeming old life mingled with a sort of pleasant tranquillity as on the calm dim floor of a perilous main.

Half of the fruit trees are dead, save for their lichen and moss and their nests in fork and niche and the robin musing in the branches.

The duck pond, deep below, is all in shadow. The alders lean over it. Some have fallen, and the moorhens have built on them, and the round vole sits there or drops off with the suddenness of fruit; but he cannot dive, for a million dead leaves are sunk or floating in the purple shallows.

Over all is the stillness of after harvest. Long ago the gleaners went home under the frosty moon, and the last wain left its memorial wisps in the elms. The rain