Workmen's advocate. (New Haven, Conn.) 1883-1891, 1889-07-27
UNDER AN ELM TREE,
BY WIN. NORRIS.

Midsummer in the country-here you
may walk between the fields and hedges
that are. as it were, one huge nosegay
for you, redolent of bean flowers and
clover and sweet hay and elder blossom.
The cottage gardens are bright with
flowers, the cottages themselves mostly
models of architecture in their way.
Above them towers here and there the
architecture proper Of days hygone,
when every craftsman was an artist and
brought definite intelligence to bear
upon his work. Man in the past, nature
III the present, seem to be bent on
pleasing you and making all things de-
lightful to your senses; even the burn
ing dusty road has look of luxury as
you lie on the strip of roadside green,
and listen to the backbirds singing,
surely for your benefit, and was going
to say as if they were paid to do it, but
! was wrong for as it is they seem to be
doing their best
And all, or let us say most things, are
brilliantly alive. The shadowy bleak in
the river down yonder which is--ignor.
ant of the fate that Barking Reach is
preparing for its waters-sapphire blue
under this rutliing wind and cloudless
sky, and barred across here and there
with the pearly white-howered water
weeds, every yard of its banks treas
ure of delicate design, meadowsweet
and dewberry and comfrey and bed
straw-from the bleak in the river,
amongst the labyrinth of grasses, to the
starlings busy in the new shorn fields,
or about the gray ridges of the hay, all
is eager, and think all is happy that is
not anxious.
What s,that thought that has come
into ones head AZ one turns round in the
| shadow of the roadside elm? A coun-
try-sde worth fighting for, if that were
necessary, worth taking trouble to de-
fend its peace. | raise my head, and
| betwiXt the elm boughs | see far off
gray buttressed down rising over the
sea of green and blue-green meadows
and fields, and dim on the flank of it
over its buttresses can see q quaint fig
ure made by cutting the short turf
away from the chalk of the hillside; a
figure which represents a White Horse
according to the heraldry of the period,
eleven hundred years ago. Hard by
that hillside the country people of the
day did verify fight for the peace and
loveliness Of this country where lie,
and coming back from their victory
scored the image of the White Horse as
a token of their valor, and, who knows,
perhaps as an example for their descen-
dants to follow.
For little time it makes the blood
stir in me as | think of that, but as |
watch the swallows fitting past me
betwixt hedge and hedge, or mounting
over the hedge in an easy sweep and
hawking over the bean-feld beyond,
another thought comes over me. These
live things ! have been speaking of,
bleak and swallows and starlings and
blackbirds, are all after their kind beau
tiful and graceful; not one of them is
lacking in its due grace and beauty; but
yesterday as | was passing by hay
field there was an old red-roan cart
horse looking seriously but good
humoredly at me from a gap in the
hedge, and | stopped to make his ac-
qualntance; and | am sorry to say that
in spite of his obvious merits he was
ugly, Roman-nosed, shambling, ungain-
| ly; yet how useful had he been-for
others? Also the same day (but not in
the same field saw some other ami
mails, male and female, with whom also
made acquaintance, for the male ones
at least were thirsty. And these ami
mails, both male and female, were un-
graceful, unbeautiful, as ungainly as the
roam cart-horse; yet they were obvi-
ously useful, for they were making hay
before my eyes. Then | bethought me
that as had seen starlings in Hertford.
shire that were of the same race as the
Thames side starlings, so l had seen or
heard of featherless two-legged animals
of the same race as the thirsty creatures
in the bayfield,; they had been sculp-
tured in the freze of the Parthenon,
painted on the ceiling of the Sistine
| Chapel, imagined in literature as the
heroes and heroines of romance; nay,
when people had created in their minds
god of the universe, creator of all that
was, is or shall be, they were driven to
represent him as one of that same race
to which the thirsty haymakers be-
longed; as though supreme intelligence
and the greatest measure of graceful
ness ana beauty and majesty were at
| their highest in the race of those un-
calmly animals.
Under the elm tree these things
puzzle me, and again my thoughts
return to the bold men of that very
countryside who, coming back from
| Ashdown field, scored that White Horse
to look down forever on the valley of
the Thames; and thought it likely that
| they had this much in common with the
starlings and the bleak, that there was
more equality amongst them than we
are used to now, and that there would
have been more model available
amongst them for Wooden than one
ILL