"I don't,too.Why don't you paint cows and houses like other people,Uncle Samuel?I heard Father say once that he never knew what your pictures meant.""That's why I paint them."
"Why?"
"So that your father shan't know what they mean."Although he did not understand this any more than he understood his uncle,Jeremy was pleased with this conversation.It had been,somehow,in tone with the place and the hour;it had conveyed to him in some strange fashion that his uncle cared for all of this rather as he himself cared.Oh!he liked Uncle Samuel!
He had hoped that he might have sat on the box next to Jim,but that place was now piled up with luggage,so he was squeezed in between his mother and Mrs.Patcham,with Hamlet,very uncomfortable,between his knees.They drove off down the high road,the hot smell of the grass came to his nostrils,the sun blazed down upon them,turning the path before them into gleaming steel,and the high Glebeshire hedges,covered with thin powder,rose on both sides above them,breaking once and again to show the folding valleys,and the faint blue hills,and the heavy,dark trees with their thick,black shadows staining the grass.
The cows were clustered sleeping wherever they could find shadow;faintly sheep-bells tinkled in the distance,and now and then a stream,like broken glass,floated,cried,and was gone.They drove into a dark wood,and the sun scattered through the trees in pieces of gold and shadowy streams of arrowed light.The birds were singing,and whenever the hoofs of the horses and the wheels turned onto soft moss or lines of grass,in the sudden silence the air was filled with birds'voices.That proved that it must now be turning to the evening of the day;the sun was not very high above the wood,and the sea of blue was invaded by a high galleon of cloud that hovered with spreading sail,catching gold into its heart as it moved.They left the wood,crossed the River Garth,and came out on to moorland.Here,for the first time,Jeremy smelt the sea;the lanes had been hot,but here the wind blew across the moor,with the smell of sea-pinks and sea-gulls in it.The grass was short and rough;the soil was sand.On the horizon was the grey,melancholy tower of a deserted mine.Some bird flew with swiftly driving wings,crying as it went.The smell of the moor was as fresh as though the foot of man had never crossed it--deserted,but not alone;bare,but not empty;uninhabited,but peopled;silent,but full of voices.
Jeremy's excitement grew.He knew now how every line of the road would be.They left the moor and were on the road leading to Rafield.These were the days before they built the road from Liskane wide enough for motor-cars and other horrible inventions.Thirty years ago the way was so narrow that the briars and ferns brushed your face as you passed,and you could reach out your hand and pluck snap-dragons and dandelions and fox-gloves.Many roads twisted in and out upon one another;the corners were so sharp that sometimes the wagonette seemed to hang upon one wheel as it turned.Still no sight of the sea,but the smell of it now was everywhere,and sometimes at a sudden bend there would come a faint beat,beat upon the ear with something rhyming and measured in it,like the murmur of a sleeping giant.
They came to the bend where the hill suddenly dips at a fearful angle down into Rafield.Here they turned to the right,deep between edges again,then through a little copse,and then,as though with a whisk of the finger,right on to Cow Farm itself.
