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By the copse here now the teazles lift their spiny heads high in the hedge, the young nuts are browning, the wild mints flowering on the shores of the ditch, and the reapers are cutting ceaselessly at the ripe corn. The larks have brought their loves to a happy conclusion. Besides them the wheat in its day has sheltered many other creatures both animals and birds.
The copse is now filling up with undergrowth; the brambles are spreading, the briars extending, masses of nettles, and thistles like saplings in size and height, crowding the spaces between the ash-stoles. By the banks great cow-parsnips or "gix" have opened their broad heads of white flowers; teazles have lifted themselves into view, every opening is occupied.
The hazel generally drops its leaves at a touch about this time, and while you are nutting, if you shake a bough, they come down all around. The rushes are but faintly yellow, and the slender tips still point upwards. Dull purple burrs cover the burdock; the broad limes are withering, but the leaves are thick, and the teazles are still flowering.
Hares come hurrying out, and dash over the smooth hillside; magpies rise, poise themselves, slue round, and dive backwards into the wood; and then circumspect, lopping easily and lightly along, a fox crosses through the teazles, and slips down to a drain in the hollow; and see! another fox behind him, along the same path, and on the same errand, for each trots up to a covered drain, looks at it, and finding it stopped, pauses a second to think, and takes his resolve.
The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days, the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes.
His foreground also is nearly always occupied by flowers and herbage, carefully and individually painted from nature; while, although thus simple in plan, the arrangements of line in these landscapes of course show the influence of the master-mind, and sometimes, where the story requires it, we find the usual formulæ overleaped, and Giotto at Avignon painting the breakers of the sea on a steep shore with great care, while Orcagna, in his Triumph of Death, has painted a thicket of brambles mixed with teazles, in a manner worthy of the best days of landscape art.
The planing action of ice was shown in the ditches, where bridges of ice had been formed; these slipping, with a partial thaw, smoothed the grasses and mars of teazles in the higher part of the slope, and then lower down, as the pressure increased, cut away the earth, exposing the roots of grasses, and sometimes the stores of acorns laid up by mice.
By the shore of the ditch there still stand a few dry, dead dock stems, with some dry reddish-brown seed adhering. Some dry brown nettle stalks remain; some grey and broken thistles; some teazles leaning on the bushes. The power of winter has reached its utmost now, and can go no farther.
In the back eddies and shallows the dying lily leaves covered the surface with scales of red and copper, and all along the banks teazles and frogbits, and brown and green reeds, and sedges of bronze and russet, made a screen, through which the black and white moorhens popped in and out, while the water-rats, now almost losing the aquatic habit, and becoming pedestrian, sat peeling rushes with their teeth, and eyeing the shepherd on the weir.
It is always full, with the water throbbing up clear from the invisible vents below, and tiny white water-shells floating and falling in the basin, set round with liverwort and moss, and watering a bed of teazles in the wood below. Children drink from it, and pluck wild strawberries by its banks, and the pheasant and the fox come there to quench their thirst.
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