There was a time when the chief delight of summer lay in playing cricket.  What ecstasy it was to be well set and scoring fast on the hard-baked ground (the harder the better), cutting to the boundary when the ball pitched short on the off, and driving her hard along the ground when they pitched one up!  What could surpass the joy of scoring a century in those long summer days?  Now we would as soon spend the holidays in the woods and by the busy trout stream, reading and taking note of the trees and the birds and the rippling of the waters as they flow onwards, ever onwards, towards the sea.  There comes a time to all men, sooner or later, when we say to ourselves, Cui bono? In a few short years I shall no longer be able to hit the ball so hard, and in the “field” I am already becoming a trifle slow.  Then do we take to ourselves pursuits that we can follow until the limbs are stiffened with age and the hair is white as snow.

Having spent the best years of life in the pursuit of pleasures that, however engrossing, nevertheless bore no real and lasting fruit, we finally fall back on interests that will last a lifetime, perhaps an eternity—­for who knows how much of knowledge we shall take with us to another world?  Aristotle was not far wrong when he described earthly happiness as a life of contemplation, with a moderate equipment of external good fortune and prosperity.  There is no book so well worthy to be studied as the book of nature, no melodies like those of the field and fallow, wood and wold, and the still small voice of the busy streams labouring patiently onwards day by day.

In the fields beyond the river haymakers are busy with the second crop.  Down to the ford comes a great yellow hay-cart, drawn by two strong horses, tandem fashion.  One small boy alone is leading the big horses.  Arriving at the ford, he jumps on to the leader’s back and rides him through.  The horses strain and “scaut,” and the cart bumps over the deep ruts, nearly upsetting.  Luckily there is no accident.  So much is entrusted to these little farm lads of scarce fifteen years of age it is a wonder they do the work so well.  From the tops of the firs comes the sound of pigeons winging their way from the “grove” to the “conygers” (the latter word means the “place of rabbits”; there are lots of woods so called in Gloucestershire).  It is a curious piping sound that wood-pigeons make, and, not seeing the birds, you might think it came from the throat instead of the wings.  One day two of us were looking at a wood-pigeon flying over, when we observed something drop from the skies and fall into the stream.  On going up we saw that it was an egg she had dropped.  There it lay at the bottom of the brook, apparently unbroken by the fall.  Floating on the soft south wind, a heron flies over so quietly that unless he had given one of his characteristic croaks it was a hundred to one you did not see him pass.  Many a heron and wild duck must pass over us unobserved