COUNTRY LIFE
WHEN the wind turns out of the north-east, where it has Inca for a month, we might be inhabiting another planet. Everything responds to the-kindness of the air, and I go from one object to another, animate and inanimate, almost exhausted by appreciation. Even stones take on more colour ; and as for sensitive creatures, such as nightingales and grass, they are almost in a conflagration of rapturous happiness. One need not be a mystic, like Richard Jefferies, to observe the moods of plants and rocks. For the first time since I returned from a sulky Tuscany I have heard the nightingales round my Kentish home, singing in a transport of desperate soliloquy through the apple orchards and down along the hedgerows of the valley. They mourn to each other, bandying sorrowful echoes and thus doubling their grief. I stood recently listening, while the planet Venus went down the sky behind the orchard, winding her way through the blossom-laden branches. The earth was still sodden after the morning's storm, and perfume drugged the air from great clots of wild parsley waist-high on the lane-edges. The scent from the apple trees dominated all the rest.
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