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Though no leaves were yet on the trees, ruddy brown buds just ready for bursting clothed every branch. And the grass along the hedges was starred with celandines and daisies, while yellow catkins sprinkled the bushes above them.
The whole of this radiant Easter day I have spent out of doors, sitting at first among the windflowers and celandines, and then, later, walking with the babies to the Hirschwald, to see what the spring had been doing there; and the afternoon was so hot that we lay a long time on the turf, blinking up through the leafless branches of the silver birches at the soft, fat little white clouds floating motionless in the blue.
There the gold of the gorse flames in many a sudden sheet and splash over the wastes whereon last year's ling-bloom, all sere and gray, makes a sad-colored world. But the season's change is coming fast. Celandines twinkle everywhere, and primroses, more tardy and more coy, already open wondering eyes. The sea lies smooth with a surface just wind-kissed and strewed with a glory of sun-stars.
It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls. Turning, they passed down the high-road, that went between high banks towards the church.
One day Margaret and her father had been as far as the fields that lay around the town; it was early spring, and she had gathered some of the hedge and ditch flowers, dog-violets, lesser celandines, and the like, with an unspoken lament in her heart for the sweet profusion of the South. Her father had left her to go into Milton upon some business; and on the road home she met her humble friends.
They seemed to be pressing themselves at the sun." And then the celandines ever after drew her with a little spell. Anthropomorphic as she was, she stimulated him into appreciating things thus, and then they lived for her. She seemed to need things kindling in her imagination or in her soul before she felt she had them.
"This, next!" and Cicely pelted him full in the face with one of her velvety cowslip-bunches 'And this, catch me if you can!" Away she flew over the grass, with Adderley after her. Through tall buttercups and field daisies they raced each other like children, startling astonished bees from repasts in clover-cups and shaking butterflies away from their amours on the starwort and celandines.
Hopetoun Woods were still bare and brown, but soon the larches would get their pencils, the beeches would unfurl tiny leaves of living green, and the celandines begin to poke their yellow heads through the carpet of last year's leaves. Mrs. Hope was sitting close to the window that looked out on the Hopetoun Woods.
Up High Street and Smith Street to Grange Road, where we mount and away from houses and streets and the fashionable world; among the fields and hedges, just decking themselves with Daisies and Celandines, and every now and then, at the top of the many little hills which the road crosses, comes a peep of the bright blue sea, from which, go where we will, we can never get very far away in Guernsey.
The celandines in particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon's Seal, and all the birdcherries blossomed in a burst.