COUNTRY LIFE
ON the skyline to our right I could see the roof and chimneys of a little white-washed farm, but we were past it before I recalled that I knew the man who lives there. I had talked to him last summer. It had been a glorious evening with a blue haze in the distance aboie the town, the heather in bloom and the sheep moving slowly about the banks and mounds searching for that short, sweet grass that gives lamb such a fine flavour. My friend had smiled at my remark about his having picked the top of the world as a place in which to live. " Nine months of winter here," he had remarked. " Can't keep chickens because we're too exposed. Fit for nothing but sheep." I began to understand what he meant The village down below had seemed a warm, sheltered place, but here the road was icy, the fields were frozen and the wind that blew across the hill on which the little farm crouched was the very breath of the north-east We passed a man pushing a bicycle. He turned a red and blue face towards us, and gave us a wave of his hand. This was the top of the world, as I had called it in summer, but nothing is ever quite what it seems on a balmy evening in July.
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