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Returning home from a ramble over the headland, his observant eye was caught by the sight of a narrow foot-track that, crossing the main pathway of the cliff, wound steeply upward and seemingly lost itself in a tangle of gorse and bracken. Stirred by a boyish desire for exploration, he paused, turned into this obscure track, and incontinently began its ascent.
A field of yellow corn ablaze with scarlet poppies, a group of trees among which the copper beech blazed with a glory as of the sunset, a glimpse of a wide common all aflame with sweet-scented gorse ... now and again a hint of the river flashing and sparkling beneath the shining sky Toni, the ignorant, despised Toni, knew how to appreciate the glories of the earth as the brilliant Millicent Loder could never do.
In April its flowers, though much concealed by leaves, dot the sides of the ditches with colour, like the purple tint that lurks in the amethyst. A small black patch marks the site of one of those gorse fires which are so common in Surrey. This was extinguished before it could spread beyond a few bushes.
There were sedges and rushes, too, in the bogs, and coarse grass on the forest pastures or "leas" as we call them to this day round here but no real green fields; and, I suspect, very few gay flowers, save in spring the sheets of golden gorse, and in summer the purple heather. Such was old England or rather, such was this land before it was England; a far sadder, damper, poorer land than now.
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.
In this hedge the first nightingale of the year sings, beginning some two or three days before the bird which comes to the bushes in the gorse, which will presently be mentioned. It is, or rather was, a favourite meadow with the partridges; one summer there was, I think, a nest in or near it, for I saw the birds there daily. But the next year they were absent.
It was certainly a fact that he never would have but one out in a day, and he was wont to declare that Smith took out his second horse chiefly that Jones might know that he did so. Down here, at Gorse Hall, the Post Office clerk had often been received as a visitor, but not at Gorse Hall had he ever seen Lady Frances. This lord had peculiar ideas about hunting, in reference to sport in general.
"Snowstorm" a small gorse half way between Fairford and Lechlade stations on the Great Western Railway is a favourite draw. If a fox goes away you see men sitting down in their saddles and cramming at the fences as hard as their horses can gallop.
Many of our shrubs, which would otherwise afford an agreeable food to horses, are armed with thorns or prickles, which secure them from those animals; as the holly, hawthorn, gooseberry, gorse. In the extensive moorlands of Staffordshire, the horses have learnt to stamp upon a gorse-bush with one of their fore-feet for a minute together, and when the points are broken, they eat it without injury.
Down below glistened a sea of burnished gold, with tints and shades of purple grey; above stretched a sky of still more glowing colours; and landward, rising to the blue of the zenith, the rugged moorland was covered with a mantle of heath and gorse, which shone in the evening sun in a rich mingling of gold and purple. "What a glorious evening!" were Will's first thoughts.
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