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Her lips very red; her cheeks tanned with the sun, but in such wise that her own white and red shone through the sun's painting, so that her face was as sweet as the best wheat-ear in a ten-acre field when the season hath been good. Her hands were not like those of a demoiselle who sitteth in a chamber to be looked at, but brown as of one who hath borne the sickle in the sun.
Would I have greater riches, I have but to walk a hundred yards from my house, on the neighbouring plateau, once a shady forest, to-day a dreary solitude where the Cricket browses and the Wheat-ear flits from stone to stone. The love of lucre has laid waste the land. Because wine paid handsomely, they pulled up the forest to plant the vine.
Both being deemed equally worthy of reward, Parma, after the city had been won, took from his own cap a sprig of jewels and a golden wheat-ear ornamented with a gem, which he had himself worn in place of a plume, and thus presented each with a brilliant token of his regard.
Their surroundings as they grow up, the home, the food, the associates, all are bad. They are trained into vice, educated into criminality; so surely as from the sown corn rises the wheat-ear, so from the sowing of misery, filth, and starvation shall arise crime. And the root of all is poverty and ignorance.
There was a pretty grayish one, of the size of a lark, that was hopping about some great stones; and when he flew he showed a great deal of white above his tail. Mr. A. That was a wheat-ear. They are reckoned very delicious birds to eat, and frequent the open downs in Sussex, and some other counties, in great numbers.
A wheat-ear, brought God knows whence, was filling out to ripening. About their slender roots ran partridges with out-stretched necks. The air was filled with the notes of a thousand different birds. In the sky, immovable, hung the hawks, their wings outspread, and their eyes fixed intently on the grass.
"Thus," says Canon Kingsley, "the fight had thundered on the live-long afternoon, beneath the virgin cliffs of Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, while myriad sea fowl rose screaming from every ledge, and with their black wings spotted the snow-white walls of chalk; and the lone shepherd hurried down the slopes above to peer over the dizzy ledge, and forgot the wheat-ear fluttering in his snare, while, trembling, he gazes upon glimpses of tall masts and gorgeous flags, piercing at times the league-broad veil of sulphur-smoke which weltered far below."
He was then fourscore and two years old; but his appearance was more aged, for his life had been full of suffering and poverty; and his venerable hands and skinny arms were heart-melting evidences of his ineffectual power to struggle much longer in the warfare of this world. In sooth, he was a chosen wheat-ear, ripened and ready for the garnels of salvation.
But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.
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