It was during many a lonely walk among the red-berried hedges and old orchards, where the rotting cider-apples lay wasp-eaten in the tangled swathes of grass, that these events worked their wills upon him. Sunday after Sunday, as September gave place to October and October gave place to November, he would lean upon some lichen-covered gate and struggle to give intelligible form to these “worries” of his. Threaded in and out of such ponderings were a thousand vivid impressions of those out-of-the-way spots. The peculiar “personality” of certain century-old orchards, of which the grey twisted trunks and the rain-bent grass seemed only the outward aspects, grew upon his mind beyond everything else. How heavily the hart’s-tongue ferns drooped earthward under the scooped hollows of the wet clay-banks! How heavily the cold raindrops fell⁠—silence falling upon silence⁠—when the frightened yellowhammers fled from his approach! He felt at such times as though they must be composed of very old rain, those shaken showers; each tremulous globe among them having reflected through many a slow dawn nothing but yellow leaves, through many a long night nothing but faint white stars!