A SPLENDID Midsummer shone over England: skies so pure,
suns so radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom
favour, even singly, our wave-girt land. It was as if a band
of Italian days had come from the South, like a flock of
glorious passenger birds, and lighted to rest them on the
cliffs of Albion. The hay was all got in; the fields round
Thornfield were green and shorn; the roads white and
baked; the trees were in their dark prime; hedge and wood,
full-leaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the sunny
hue of the clear meadows between.

On Midsummer-eve, Adèle, weary with gathering wild
strawberries in Hay Lane half the day, had gone to bed with
the sun. I watched her drop asleep, and when I left her I
sought the garden.

It was now the sweetest hour of the twenty-four:—"Day
its fervid fires had wasted," and dew fell cool on panting
plain and scorched summit. Where the sun had gone down
in simple state—pure of the pomp of clouds—spread a solemn
purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace
flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and
wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven. The east had
its own charm of fine, deep blue, and its own modest gem,
a rising and solitary star: soon it would boast the moon;
but she was yet beneath the horizon.

I walked a while on the pavement; but a subtle, well-
known scent—that of a cigar—stole from some window;
I saw the library casement open a hand-breadth; I knew
I might be watched thence; so I went apart into the orchard.
No nook in the grounds more sheltered and more Eden-like;
it was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers: a very high
wall shut it out from the court, on one side; on the other,
a beech avenue screened it from the lawn. At the bottom was
a sunk fence; its sole separation from lonely fields: a
winding walk, bordered with laurels and terminating in a
giant horse-chesnut, circled at the base by a seat, led down
to the fence. Here one could wander unseen. While such
honey-dew fell, such silence reigned, such gloaming gathered,
I felt as if I could haunt such shade for ever: but in threading
the flower and fruit-parterres at the upper part of the in-

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