ON Sunday my little tree was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from the blizzard.Now the mild thin air brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of the sun.Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.
The air was sharp-set; a delicate rime frosted roof and road; the sea lay hazy and still like a great pearl.Then as the sky stirred with flush upon flush of warm rosy light, it passed from misty pearl to opal with heart of flame, from opal to gleaming sapphire.
The earth called, the fields called, the river called - that pied piper to whose music a man cannot stop his ears.It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:-"So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages."
Half an hour later I was away by the early train that carries the branch mails and a few workmen, and was delivered at the little wayside station with the letters.The kind air went singing past as I swung along the reverberating road between the high tree-crowned banks which we call hedges in merry Devon, with all the world to myself and the Brethren.A great blackbird flew out with a loud "chook, chook," and the red of the haw on his yellow bill.
A robin trilled from a low rose-bush; two wrens searched diligently on a fallen tree for breakfast, quite unconcerned when I rested a moment beside them; and a shrewmouse slipped across the road followed directly by its mate.March violets bloomed under the sheltered hedge with here and there a pale primrose; a frosted bramble spray still held its autumn tints clinging to the semblance of the past; and great branches of snowy blackthorn broke the barren hedgeway as if spring made a mock of winter's snows.
Light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year I sped on again, stray daffodils lighting the wayside, until I heard the voice of the stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows.There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming 'Victory' to an awakened earth.They range in serried ranks right down to the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water's edge where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright grass in their thousands, stretch away until they melt in a golden cloud at the far end of the misty mead.
Through the field gate and across the road I see them, starring the steep earth bank that leads to the upper copse, gleaming like pale flames against the dark tree-boles.There they have but frail tenure; here, in the meadows, they reign supreme.
At the upper end of the field the river provides yet closer sanctuary for these children of the spring.Held in its embracing arms lies an island long and narrow, some thirty feet by twelve, a veritable untrod Eldorado, glorious in gold from end to end, a fringe of reeds by the water's edge, and save for that - daffodils.
