My life in
the plantation in winter was a constant watching for spring. May,
June, and July were the leafless months, but not wholly songless. On
any genial and windless day of sunshine in winter a few swallows would
reappear, nobody could guess from where, to spend the bright hours
wheeling like house-martins about the house, revisiting their old
breeding-holes under the eaves, and uttering their lively little
rippling songs, as of water running in a pebbly stream. When the sun
declined they would vanish, to be seen no more until we had another
perfect spring-like day.
On such days in July and on any mild misty morning, standing on the
mound within the moat I would listen to the sounds from the wide open
plain, and they were sounds of spring--the constant drumming and
rhythmic cries of the spur-wing lapwings engaged in their social
meetings and "dances," and the song of the pipit soaring high up and
pouring out its thick prolonged strains as it slowly floated downwards
to the earth.
In August the peach blossomed. The great old trees standing wide apart
on their grassy carpet, barely touching each other with the tips of
their widest branches, were like great mound-shaped clouds of
exquisite rosy-pink blossoms. There was then nothing in the universe
which could compare in loveliness to that spectacle.
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