beset by a yelling throng of red-faced drunkards, or our horses pulled up with a jerk, because a tipsy fellow is lying across the road.
We arrange our journey in a very leisurely way, so as to enjoy the pleasures of the wayside. When we take our morning stroll through the unreaped fields we hear the quail and the corncrake from the meadows. When we go among the reapers we see the partridges run out from the furrow; and in the evening, when we turn in where the last shocks have been carried out, we find the geese already busy among the stubbles, gleaning the grains as the women and children are gleaning the ears. In the clover fields, whence the barley or oats have been carried, there is a gleaning which the farmer pays for. If he were an easy man, satisfied to let mice and birds consume his produce, he need not take this trouble; but he has rid himself of mice and birds, and the clover must not be choked next spring with self-sown corn: so there are the women picking up the golden ears from the green and fragrant carpet. We find pigs also ferreting out what they can find: and a good feast they make where the crop has been fully ripe.
These evenings among the corn-fields are like no others. There is the harvest-moon—so singular in its apparent bulk, and its hue, and its immediate appearance after sunset for several evenings together. To stand among the fields of some fertile plain, and see the great orb surge up from the abyss of the horizon, not like a disk gliding on the sky, but disclosing immeasurable depths of space beyond it, is an experience of August alone. Not only is the mellow hue of the great globe a singular appearance, but its light is mellow too, as it bathes the dome-like trees, and casts the shadows of the hedgerows upon the fields.
Then, as we make our way into some green lane, there are the gipsies pretending to turn in for the night. When there are so many creatures abroad in the stubbles, all may not be duly housed at night, and it may be harvest time for gipsies as for other people. Perhaps the women and children sleep under their stifling tilt; but the men get into sacks, it appears, and find a soft place on the grass—free to go and come where profit may invite. There the beetles may slap their faces, and the bats flit round them, and the young frogs jump upon them from the neighbouring ditch, where they were tadpoles only the other day. There are other gangs than those of gipsies when we traverse the hop counties. In Worcestershire and Herefordshire we find travelling families and groups of neighbours all along the road, or busy among the hop-poles. Of all our crops, surely this is the most beautiful—with its bunches tossing in the breeze, and its streamers waving, and light and shadow always at play among the leaves. The life of the hop-garden, with its errant population, is an unique spectacle; and now is the time to see it. It will be a greater change than has occurred yet if some mechanical means of getting the crop should be introduced which should banish the hop-pickers. Possibly such a change might be good for the physique of the hops and the morale of the pickers (who are not an immaculate order of people); but it will extinguish one of the most picturesque aspects of English rural life.
When we get home we find that the decline of the year has indeed begun. The swifts are gone. We miss them, and inquire for them, and find that they vanished three days before. There is already hedge-fruit for the birds; the golden rod and meadow saffron abound: the asters and marigolds are out in the garden, and there are ripe codlings in the orchard. The controversy about the relative merits of barns and stacks has arisen with seasonable vehemence. Everything tells of the approach of autumn. I must leave wife and daughters to watch its coming and report its appearances; for I have to catch the skirts of summer on the Scotch hills. There, in stirring up the black game, sportsmen find the sunshine, and the gaudy show of heath flowers, and the reflection from glassy lakes at least as full of summer heat as any July scene in England. I must see whether it will be so this year.
UP IN A BALLOON.
I do not know how it is, or why it is, but I have always had an intense hankering to go up in a balloon. Naturally and constitutionally I have an aversion to great heights—to such an extent, indeed, that it is a perfect misery to me to have to look out of a third-floor window.
My sensations on getting up to any considerable height somewhat resemble those of the stout old lady in “Punch,” who will not approach the railings of the cliff at Brighton for fear of slipping through. No iron railing appears to me high enough or strong enough effectually to provide for my safety; and though I do not quite sympathise with, I can quite understand, those insane ideas which render it necessary to put an iron cage at the top of all our monuments.
I cannot reconcile these sensations with my long-standing wish to become an aeronaut but so it is. Somehow or other these elevated ideas of mine remained ungratified till a few days ago—whether from want of pluck, want of funds, or want of time, I do not feel bound to specify.
I cannot rest, my dear Charlie, till I have made you au fait of my doings on the eventful evening that I made my first ascent.
It is needless to enlarge upon the circumstances that led to my expedition; how I was down at Cremorne rather late one evening, and in a moment of excitement and claret rashly pledged myself to pay five guineas for the glorious opportunity of breaking my neck. I will not describe my waking thoughts next morning when my engagement of the previous evening slowly came across my mind. I resolved, however, to stick to my bargain, influenced partly by the certainty of being laughed at if I shirked it, and partly by the possibility of forfeiting my deposit of five guineas.
Selecting two of the most faithful from among my own familiar friends, I imparted my intentions to them, and we at once started in a four-wheel cab for Cremorne Gardens. It was fortunately (as I said with a sickly grin) a lovely evening, and there was neither wind nor rain to prevent our