Later in the year, on August Bank holiday, I found him at an inn, where a farm bailiff was treating the labourers to much ale. The landlord had a young relative down from London, who sang a song in the bar about a skylark who was to take a message to his mother in heaven. At this the tramp melted a little: the pale face of the singer and the high shrill voice made an entrance somewhere, and he tried to join in the song. But towards evening he was to be found sticking pins through his cheek and ears and into his arms, and offering, for a small sum, to stick them into any part whatsoever; or, lying on his back and twisting his head back--the muscles in his throat croaking all the time like frogs--to pick up with his teeth a penny that lay on the floor. The bailiff had caught him. He did odd jobs about the farm, and lived in a forgotten cottage, too far away from anywhere to keep pigs in. But he slept in the cottage only on one or two nights in the seven. During the rest of the week he was to be found at night under the edge of a copse, beside a little fire, reminding himself of the old, roomy England which he used to know.
All day the winter seemed to have gone. The horses’ hoofs on the moist, firm road made a clear “cuck-oo” as they rose and fell; and far off, for the first time in the year, a ploughboy, who remembered spring and knew that it would come again, shouted “Cuckoo! cuckoo!”
A warm wind swept over the humid pastures and red sand-pits on the hills and they gleamed in a lightly muffled sun. Once more in the valleys the ruddy farmhouses and farm-buildings seemed new and fair again, and the oast-house cones stood up as prophets of spring, since the south wind had turned all their white vanes towards the north, and they felt the sea that lay--an easy journey on such a day--beyond the third or fourth wooded ridge in the south. The leaves of goose-grass, mustard, vetch, dog’s mercury, were high above the dead leaves on hedge banks. Primrose and periwinkle were blossoming. Like flowers were the low ash-tree boles where the axe had but lately cut off the tall rods; flowerlike and sweet also the scent from the pits where labourers dipped the freshly peeled ash poles in tar. In the elms, sitting crosswise on a bough, sang thrush and missel thrush; in the young corn, the larks; the robins in the thorns; and in all the meadows the guttural notes of the rooks were mellowed by love and the sun.