COUNTRY LIFE
OCTOBER makes some amends for a summer of adolescent promise but. soon falling into a melancholic middle age and a soured eld. The late sun came shouldering through the rolling mists like Moby Dick out of the ocean spray and surges. The mists lingered long enough to diffuse the mellow sunlight, to bespangle herb and bush, to enhance the warm colours of messed and lichened roofs, berried hedgeroWs and laden orchard boughs and to rise like wisps of wood-smoke from the smoulder- ing ploughlands. The floral gaiety of cottage gardens by Severn side
" As though the winter were an idle tale And leaves could never fall or throats be dumb " was caught up by the stained-glass radiance of the kingfisher flying over the green salting of Littleton Worth, studded with the mauve flowers of sea-aster, short-stalked as any daisy on the lawn, and the pink stars of sea-spurry, while the Dame gold descending upon the mud-banks of the rills ambling down to the river lustred the greeny bronze mantles and black gorgets of the lapwings.
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