Within the fields the hawthorn hedges beautifully
enclosed were groups of resigned mother sheep with their young lambs
about them. The curious pointed tops of the red hopkilns, piercing the
trees near the farmhouses, wore an almost intentional air of adding
picturesque detail. There were clusters of old buildings and dots
of cottages and cottage gardens which made her now and then utter
exclamations of delight. Little inarticulate Rosy had seen and felt it
all twelve years before on her hopeless bridal home-coming when Nigel
had sat huddled unbecomingly in the corner of the railway carriage. Her
power of expression had been limited to little joyful gasps and obvious
laudatory adjectives, smothered in their birth by her first glance at
her bridegroom. Betty, in seeing it, knew all the exquisiteness of her
own pleasure, and all the meanings of it.
Yes, it was England--England. It was the England of Constable and
Morland, of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, the Brontes and George Eliot.
The land which softly rolled and clothed itself in the rich verdure of
many trees, sometimes in lovely clusters, sometimes in covering copse,
was Constable's; the ripe young woman with the fat-legged children
and the farmyard beasts about her, as she fed the hens from the wooden
piggin under her arm, was Morland's own.
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