A Nocturne The new March moon has brought a change
to the hours after dark. I was out prowling round before dinner, with the corgi snuffling his way along like a miniature doodle-bomb, exploding at every rabbit-hole. Light had almost dissolved and only the dim shapes of the landscape were to be discerned. But the larks were singing up in the luminous sky, filling it with cascades of song that served as substitute for light. Up the hill, behind my own house among a frame of pines, several blackbirds were giving a male voice recital. It was proud stuff they offered: take it or leave it. I was too far off to hear the words; but 1 knew what they would be—rich testament phrases expressing all the superb certainties of life. 1 took them, and was thankful.
And what a sunset to give a background to this concert of soprano and baritone! Atter tne windy day the sky had cleared, but the swept•up masses of cloud lay banked in the west under the sun. His great blond- red disk was reflected on this cloudbank, the image seeming to be a perfect (ask, too, slightly fuller in tinge, lying at right-angles before the sun, and touching it, rim to rim.
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