Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/774

ÆT. 63] and all the little streams that are fed from the Cotswolds ran full and deep brown. The noise of waters was everywhere. Clumps of Michaelmas daisies were in flower in the drenched cottage gardens, and the thinning willows had turned, not to the brilliance of their common October colouring, but to a dull tarnished gold. The rooks were silent in the elms about the Manor House. Apples lay strewn on the grass in the orchard. In the garden, the yew dragon, untrimmed since his own hand had last clipped it, had sprouted out into bristles. A few pink roses and sweet peas still lingered among the chrysanthemums and dahlias of the autumnal plots.

One of the farm wagons, with a yellow body and bright red wheels, was prepared in the morning to carry the coffin from Lechlade station; it was drawn by a sleek roan mare and led by one of the Kelmscott carters. The wagon was wreathed with vine, and strewn with willow boughs over a carpeting of moss. In it the coffin, simple and even beautiful in its severe design, of unpolished oak with wrought iron handles, was placed on its arrival, and over it was laid a piece of Broussa brocade which had been long in Morris's possession, and a wreath of bay. The group of mourners followed it along the dripping lanes, between russet hedgerows and silver-grey slabbed stone fences, to the churchyard gate, and up the short lime-avenue to the tiny church. There the Rev. W.F. Adams, Vicar of Little Faringdon, Morris's schoolfellow at Marlborough, and the friend and neighbour of later years at Kelmscott, read the funeral service. With the family and friends were mingled workmen from Merton Abbey and Oxford Street, comrades of the Socialist League, pupils of the Art Workers' Guild, and Kelmscott villagers in their daily working dress.