And Polumetis didn’t win.

And I’m as tired as a dog....

And so say all of us.

XXVI

THIS BLASTED WORLD

Everything has begun to have a blasted look till the sun shines.  The ferns have been beaten down by the wind and the rain, and lie withered and broken-backed among the brambles, waiting till some poor man thinks it worth his while to go off with a load of them on his back for bedding.  The brambles, too, all hoops and arches, have the air of dying things, though white blossoms still continue to appear, and the fruit is not yet all ripened and many of the leaves are as red and bright as flowers.  The edges of most of the leaves have began to crumple:  they are victims of a creeping sickness that eats into them and dirties them, and makes bramble and fern together an inextricable wilderness of refuse.

This, however, is only if one looks too closely.  The hill that loses itself among the rocks on the sea-shore is capped and patched with just such refuse as this, but how happily the rust-colour of dying things is broken by the grey of the loose stone walls—­“hedges,” they call them in Cornwall—­that seem to totter up the hill like old men!  The mist of rain that leaves each individual plant bedraggled seems to make the red and green and grey pattern of the patched hill only more beautiful and mysterious.  The truth is, winter speaks with two voices even in these early days.  She has one voice that sends cold shivers down our backs.  She has another voice that is refreshment like water from a spring.  She speaks with the first voice in the crooked trees.  In the summer they were cloaked and glorious.  Now, when their cloaks seem so much more necessary, they are left naked, poor creatures, their backs to the sea-wind, with the air of runaways unable to escape.  They seem bent and poised for flight, but when a blast of wind comes and tugs at them they are as the stump of a tooth that will not move, and the leaves (such of them as are left), which in summer made a music as pleasant as that of windbells, rattle in their branches like the laughter of a skeleton.  The oak and the thorn-bush could scarcely writhe more if they were crippled by rheumatism.  Every leaf on the sycamore is spotted as if with some foul black acid.

Here, too, however, as soon as the leaves have fallen, the world is restored to cheerfulness.  The withering tree seems a sufferer.  The fallen leaf is an imp, an adventurer.  As the wind sweeps round a bend in the road, leaf after leaf is up and performing cart-wheels down the road as if Christmas Day had come.  Thousands of them, borne along in a dance of this kind, advance with the beflustered, orderly air of a procession of starlings.  The world ceases to be a universal grave.  It is at the very least a dance and a dust-storm.