Page:The Heart of England.djvu/35

 it so as I came home. But I cannot go with you. I return to think about the Golden Age."

He tied the flowers round the pole of a signboard that stood on a harsh courtyard of gravel strewn with dirty paper, and pursued his homeward road, eager for "The Old Angel" or "The Chequers" where he could vivify his vision of the Golden Age.

In the sky, the distant dawn sent up to the clouds a faint dream of light that made their shapes just visible. A hedge-sparrow awoke in the furze beside the road, twittered clearly and became silent again; on the other side, in some invisible trees high up, a few rooks began to talk. Then, for a little while as I went on, the darkness was complete, and the silence also, except that the telegraph wires forced a faint complaint out of the light wind.

As the clouds filled with that dream of light and the road began visibly to lengthen out, I left London behind or recognised it only in the blue bowls and copper-ware gleaming through the windows of new houses round about. Beyond them rolled a ploughed country of such abounding and processional curves that it seemed almost to move and certainly to rejoice; here and there the curves dimpled suddenly and made a hollow, where elm or beech sprang up in the midst of the ploughland, in a small consistory, grave, shining, fair. To right and left, where the curves of the land rose to the sky, the white foam of orchards half buried rosy farmhouses and their own dark boughs. The dense thorn hedges gleamed all wet, compelling the wind to dip deep into them and taste their fragrance, coolness, moistness, softness all together,