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Every curve, and shore, and shallow is as familiar now as when I followed the winding stream so often. When the mowing-grass was at its height, you could not walk far beside the bank; it grew so thick and strong and full of umbelliferous plants as to weary the knees.
In this last mend of mowing-grass Sweet doth the clover smell, Crushed neath our feet red with the pass Where hell was blent with hell. And now the willowy stream is nigh, Down wend we to the ford; No shafts across its fishes fly, Nor flasheth there a sword. But lo! what gleameth on the bank Across the water wan, As when our blood the mouse-ear drank And red the river ran?
In the bunches of grass and by the gateways the germander speedwell looks like tiny specks of blue stolen, like Prometheus' fire, from the summer sky. When the mowing-grass is ripe the heads of sorrel are so thick and close that at a little distance the surface seems as if sunset were always shining red upon it.
Purple vetches along the mounds, yellow lotus where the grass is shorter, and orchis succeeds to orchis. As I write them, so these things come not set in gradation, but like the broadcast flowers in the mowing-grass. Now follows the gorse, and the pink rest-harrow, and the sweet lady's-bedstraw, set as it were in the midst of a little thorn-bush.
One evening in the summer Miriam and he went over the fields by Herod's Farm on their way from the library home. So it was only three miles to Willey Farm. There was a yellow glow over the mowing-grass, and the sorrel-heads burned crimson. Gradually, as they walked along the high land, the gold in the west sank down to red, the red to crimson, and then the chill blue crept up against the glow.
There are at least two landrails in the mowing-grass; one of them just now seemed coming straight towards the apple tree, and I expected in a minute to see the grass move, when the bird turned aside and entered the tufts and wild parsley by the hedge. Thence the call has come without a moment's pause, "crake, crake," till the thick hedge seems filled with it.
There seems always a depth, somewhere, unexplored, a thicket that has not been seen through, a corner full of ferns, a quaint old hollow tree, which may give us something. Bees go by me as I stand under the apple, but they pass on for the most part bound on a long journey, across to the clover fields or up to the thyme lands; only a few go down into the mowing-grass.
In Guernsey I have seen it in several places; about Candie, where a pair had a nest this summer in the mowing-grass before the house; near the Vallon; and about St. George. I have also seen it in Sark, but not in either of the other Islands, though no doubt it occurs in Herm, if not in Alderney. It is mentioned by Professor Ansted as occurring in Guernsey and Sark.
And one Saturday I can remember Garry, that was Bob's own girl, she ran off when her stepmother was going to bathe her ran off without a rag of clothes on can you remember, mother? And she hid in Smedley's closes it was the time of mowing-grass and nobody could find her. She hid out there all night, didn't she, mother? Nobody could find her. My word, there was a talk.
Pushing aside the stiff ranks of the wheat with both arms, the air reaches the sun-parched earth. It walks among the mowing-grass like a farmer feeling the crop with his hand one side, and opening it with his walking-stick the other. It rolls the wavelets carelessly as marbles to the shore; the red cattle redden the pool and stand in their own colour.
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