Time lies
heavy on the world. The old, old earth is glad to turn from the cark and
care of drifted centuries to the first sweet blades of green.
There is sunshine to-day after rain, and every lark is singing. Across
the vale a broad cloud-shadow descends the hillside, is lost in the
hollow, and presently, without warning, slips over the edge, coming
swiftly along the green tips. The sunshine follows--the warmer for its
momentary absence. Far, far down in a grassy coomb stands a solitary
cornrick, conical roofed, casting a lonely shadow--marked because so
solitary, and beyond it on the rising slope is a brown copse. The
leafless branches take a brown tint in the sunlight; on the summit above
there is furze; then more hill lines drawn against the sky. In the tops
of the dark pines at the corner of the copse, could the glance sustain
itself to see them, there are finches warming themselves in the sunbeams.
The thick needles shelter them, from the current of air, and the sky is
bluer above the pines. Their hearts are full already of the happy days to
come, when the moss yonder by the beech, and the lichen on the fir-trunk,
and the loose fibres caught in the fork of an unbending bough, shall
furnish forth a sufficient mansion for their young.
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