# The Heart of England/Chapter 41

PART V
THE SEA
CHAPTER XLI
A MARCH HAUL
The white houses on the hill are whiter than ever before in the early light and the south wind from over the sea. The soft, wheat-coloured sand is inscribed far from the water by the black scrawl of the overpast storm. But now the sea is broken by sliding ripples so small that they seem only the last, discontented efforts of the wind to make the surface one perfect floor of glass. The curving, foamy lines waver and swirl and are about to disappear and leave the desired level when others are born unnoticeably. The black hulls of the leaning ships gleam and darken the water, and by their reflections give it an immeasurable depth which contrasts strangely with its lucid tranquillity and the drowned roses of the departing dawn, for in the high blue sky some of the sunrise clouds have lost their way and hang, still rosy, near the zenith, round the transparent moon. The mist over the sea at the horizon is golden.
Sea and shore are at rest, all but one group of men who are welcoming a little ship that comes in upon the tide, fragrant and stately and a little weary, as with folded arms, solemn also as if she were invading, or perhaps bringing mysterious gifts for the ancient, wintry land.
And now they are hauling in the deeply-laden boat ​that seems on this fair morning to have brought the spring out of the sea; and that is why they strain grimly to have her safe on the storm-strewn shore. She is laden with flowers, with anemones and primroses for the woods, violets for the banks, marigolds for the brooks and the ungrazed, rushy corners of long fields, daffodils for the stone walls and the short turf at the edges of copses, stitchwort for the hedgerows, bittersweet may for the hawthorns, gold for the willows, white and rosy blossom for the old orchards among the hills, mezereon, jonquils, rockets, plume poppies and snapdragons and roses for the gardens; and the men heave and groan as if they feared lest the sea should still rob them of some.
All the leaves are there—the sweet hawthorn green which the children chew, the dewy, pensile leaves of hazel and beech and lime, the palmy ash leaves still misty with purple flower, the oak leaves bronzed or gilded among their rosy galls, and the streamers of the willow, and all the grasses and reeds, and the tall young adder-headed bracken for the moor, and ferns for the dripping ledges of the waterfall; and the men heave without resting, lest any should escape and so cheat them of shaded ways for rest and sport and love.
There also are the birds—the gentle martins, swallows that will seem the perfect flower of the home sweetness in stern cottages on the heights and warm farmhouses in the valleys, the chiffchafFs that shall sing in the ash and the larch, the delicate wrens of the woodland crests and the tempestuous nightingales of the thick-budded copses, silent fly-catchers for the plum trees on southern walls, cuckoos to shout over the dim water-meadows and in the ​pearly lichened oak woods, ousels to flash on the moors, skiey swifts, doves to fill the green caverns of the beeches, and all the chatterers that hide in blackthorn and cornel thickets when it is best to walk among them; and the men heave, for they are coming to the land even now.
Very near now are the lizards of the drowsy nettle-beds, snakes to curl and uncurl upon the sunlit moss, and blue sylphs for the rivulets. All are coming in from this placid sea; and so the men heave, and the white houses begin to glitter, and the golden mist over the sea promises that days shall again be long, and men shall sit carelessly on gates and sleep under the hedge at noon and adventure and make plans in the pure mornings that are at hand.