the pail was audible in the road; and the cows were already proceeding in a line to the meadows after being milked. We turned in, and found the milkmaids (for the widow still commits the task to female hands) filling their last pails; and we could not but go a little further and see what the produce of five-and-forty cows looked like.
What an ocean of milk it was,—the mixture of the past night’s and this morning’s! What a moist place was the cheese-making room, though the morning sun shone in warm, and lighted up every damp brick in the paved floor, and every flake of curd in the great tubs! The widow was there helping; for the supply of milk was now increasing daily, she said, and she must make cheese while the grass grew thick. We saw the curd set, and accepted a draught of whey; and then we were off towards the meadows again, taking a short cut through the widow’s garden and paddock.
As soon as the gate of the paddock was shut behind us, we found ourselves ankle-deep in herbage and buttercups, crowfoot and daisies, and dandelions, and all the meadow-blossoms of the spring,—even columbines growing in the dryest places, and by the river side the buckbean and water-violet, and in places the yellow iris, and long margins of flowering water-grasses. Our shadows stretched like prostrate obelisks before us, as the still low sun struck on us warm from behind: and if Jane had come out for May-dew, this was the place, for almost every spear of grass bore its diamond. If she did not collect the dew, she gathered the flowers by handfuls. There was a full chorus of birds; for we had both those of the furrow and the pasture, and of the hedgerows and woods. From one direction the breeze brought the coo of the woodpigeon, and from another the call of the cuckoo in the trees in the avenue; while the larks sprang up all round us, and the sedge warbler was in the clump by the river, and the reed warbler was somewhere about the banks. The rooks were in full caw from the park, and the thrushes from the hedgerow trees. Jane had never heard anything like this before, for she had never been out so early at the same season. The woods at a later hour were full of music; but the merry din of a May-sunrise is something much more lively.
We had been seeing the sulphur butterfly for some time: but now we met with other kinds. A handsome tortoiseshell opened and shut its wings on a tall rush; and two little white ones chased each other over the cowslips.
On we went from field to field, intending to return by the sunny side of the park woods: but as we proceeded, we saw a symptom of danger to the widow’s beautiful pastures which sent us back by nearly the same way, that we might warn her, if she was unaware, how fast the herbage was failing. The cows had been so lately turned out into the fields that we could see very well what was growing there. The buttercups were in inordinate quantity, and so were the dandelions: but we were more sorry to observe the spread of the ox-eye daisy. The acrid buttercups, and the choking stalks of the ox-eyes were excluding just so much sweet herbage: and where ox-eyes and ragwort and other pernicious weeds grow unchecked, they soon infest the whole country round.
We found the widow aware, to some extent, of the mischief: but what could she do? “Ill weeds grew apace,” as everybody knew; and who could help it? I told her what I had seen in another county last June; a mail-road bordered by pastures which for fifteen miles were ruined, or fast going to ruin, from the prevalence of this very pest, the ox-eye daisy. Whole fields contained actually nothing else; and others were powdered thick with it. In one large meadow I saw heaps of something white dotting the whole surface; and I supposed the pasture was going to be limed: but as I passed it, I saw that the mowers were in it, and that these heaps were hay-cocks, so called,—but containing perhaps a tenth part of grass to nine parts of ox-eye daisies.
Mrs. Wilson was evidently shocked at this; and she wanted to know what could be done. All I could tell her was, that I had seen a man wading through his tall meadow-grass when it was more than kneedeep, to pull up an ox-eye daisy here and there, rather than let it go to seed. The damage to the grass was a trifle in comparison, he said, to the danger of the spread of the weed. He had hard work to keep it down, while his neighbours let it grow freely on their land; but wife and children cut it up by the roots every spring, and found it answer. Where it has usurped the whole soil, there is nothing to be done but to root up and burn the whole surface; and every day’s delay is a wrong done to the country round. I was sorry to carry bad news among the cheese tubs: but the widow thanked me, wished she had sooner known the worst, and must see what could be done. There was no trusting the herdsmen in such matters. They insisted that buttercups made the cream rich; and that the stiff stalks of the worst weeds were better for the cows than grass itself.
We had no longer the lanes to ourselves on the way home. The boys were out bird-nesting for an hour or two before school; and some were peeping into every hedge, while one or another might be seen in a tree within the belt of wood which surrounded the park. Of course they met with abundant success; for an experienced practitioner like myself and these boys could not go five yards among the trees without seeing a nest on or within the trunk, or on some bough. It was too early for nestlings; but we were shown more than one cap-full of speckled eggs, blue, brown, pink, and white. Then, as we turned a reach of the river, we saw a gay group below among the willows. They were the renters of the osier bed which lies in that bend of the stream; and they were going to have a day of osier peeling. Women and children, in red and blue, looked well among the sallows; and there was a little faggot of peeled rods already.
Perhaps it might be their husbands and fathers that we heard at work in the woods above, and could see at intervals. They were barking the oaks and larches that we saw last week marked for that method of destruction. It is a somewhat dreary sight—the bare, shining, yellow tree, in its flayed condition lying prostrate, with its sprays