spring, in April.  The great trees were spangled with emerald leaf-buds; the cherries, tame and wild, the black-thorn, the plums and pears in orchards and on old, old, grey walls, were in full blossom of virgin white.  The apple trees in course of time showed pink buds.  The gardens were full of wall-flowers—­the inhabited country smelt of wall-flowers—­purple flags, narcissi, hyacinths.  The woodland was exquisitely strewn with primroses.  In the glades rose innumerable spears of purple half-opened bluebells; the eye ranged over an anemone-dotted sward in this direction; over clusters of smalt-blue dog violets in another.  Ladies’-smocks and cowslips made every meadow delicious; and the banks of the lowland streams were gorgeously gilded with king-cups.  The mountains on fine days were blue and purple in the far distance; pale green and grey in the foreground.  Under the April showers and sun-shafts they became tragic, enchanted, horrific, paradisiac.  Even the mining towns were bearable—­in the spring sunshine.  If man had left no effort untried to pile hideosity on hideosity, flat ugliness on nauseous squalor, he had not been able to affect the arch of the heavens in its lucid blue, all smokes and vapours driven away by the spring winds; he had not been able to neutralize the vast views visible from the miners’ sordid, one-storeyed dwellings, the panorama of hill and plain, of glistening water, towering peaks, and larch forests of emerald green amid the blue-Scotch pines and the black-green yews.

David in previous letters, looking into his father’s budget, had shown him he could afford to keep a pony and a pony cart.  This therefore was waiting for him at the little station with the gardener to drive.  But in a week, David, already a good horseman, had learnt to drive under the gardener’s teaching, and then was able to take his delighted father out for whole-day trips to revel in the beauties of the scenery.

They would have with them a wicker basket containing an ample lunch prepared by the generous hands of Bridget.  They would stop at some spot on a mountain pass; tether the pony, sit on a plaid shawl thrown over a boulder, and feast their eyes on green mountain-shoulders reared against the pale blue sky; or gaze across ravines not unworthy of Switzerland.  Or they would put up pony and cart at some village inn, explore old battlemented churches and churchyards with seventeenth and eighteenth century headstones, so far more tasteful and seemly than the hideous death memorials of the nineteenth century.  And ever and again the old father, looking more and more like a Druid, would recite that charming Spring song, the 104th Psalm; or fragments of Welsh poetry sounding very good in Welsh—­as no doubt Greek poetry does in properly pronounced Greek, but being singularly bald and vague in its references to earth, sea, sky and flora when translated into plain English.