Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late blackberries, which were still abundant.  It was a beautiful unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man’s-beard.

I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it was late to eat such fruit in November.  The Devil in these parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the bramble bushes and spoil the fruit.  It was even worse further north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the bushes.

He didn’t smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and then remarked in a bitter tone, “That Devil they talk about must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes in addition to all his other important work.”

I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more berries, he resumed in the same tone:  “Very fine, very beautiful all this”—­waving his hand to indicate the hedge, its rich tangle of purple-red stems and coloured leaves, and scarlet fruit and silvery oldman’s-beard.  “An artist enjoys seeing this sort of thing, and it’s nice for all those who go about just for the pleasure of seeing things.  But when it comes to a man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an empty belly, looking for work which he can’t find, he doesn’t see it quite in the same way.”

“True,” I returned, with indifference.

But he was not to be put off by my sudden coldness, and he proceeded to inform me that he had just returned from Salisbury Plain, that it had been noised abroad that ten thousand men were wanted by the War Office to work in forming new camps.  On arrival he found it was not so—­it was all a lie—­men were not wanted—­and he was now on his way to Andover, penniless and hungry and—­

By the time he had got to that part of his story we were some distance apart, as I had remained standing still while he, thinking me still close behind, had gone on picking blackberries and talking.  He was soon out of sight.

At noon the following day, the weather still being bright and genial, I went to Crux Easton, a hilltop village consisting of some low farm buildings, cottages, and a church not much bigger than a cottage.  A great house probably once existed here, as the hill has a noble avenue of limes, which it wears like a comb or crest.  On the lower slope of the hill, the old unkept hedges were richer in colour than in most places, owing to the abundance of the spindle-wood tree, laden with its loose clusters of flame-bright, purple-pink and orange berries.

Here I saw a pretty thing:  a cock cirl-bunting, his yellow breast towards me, sitting quietly on a large bush of these same brilliant berries, set amidst a mass of splendidly coloured hazel leaves, mixed with bramble and tangled with ivy and silver-grey traveller’s-joy.  An artist’s heart would have leaped with joy at the sight, but all his skill and oriental colours would have made nothing of it, for all visible nature was part of the picture, the wide wooded earth and the blue sky beyond and above the bird, and the sunshine that glorified all.