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Norman Brucie^
From a Photodrama of the English Countryside by BANNISTER MERWIN (Pictures made in England)
THE open downs stretched toward the valleys and waved softly into the uplands again, dotted with barrows, crisscrossed with hawthorn hedges,, a-shimmer with goldening gorse and low furze-bushes. Old Luke stood at the top of one of the slopes, a strange, inevitable, stark figure, in broad hat and fustians, looming against the infinite background of the sky. His eyes, beneath the white thatch of brows, were on the far, fragrant landscape in slow pondering. Life on Cornwall downs is not a foster-parent of dreams or visions; yet the slow years that had wandered the pastures, with Old Luke behind his white flock, had taught him many things — the neighboring farmers said he was a ' ' queer 'un as 'adn 't a notion o' butterin' 'is luck!" Of pence and pounds, indeed. Old Luke Welden knew little and had little. Yet he was the richest-souled man in Widden Wold.
From where he stood he could glimpse the straw-thatched roof of his cottage, beyond the turn of the lane, and hear, distance-softened, the high piping of his daughter Ellen above her housewifely round — a snug cottage, a buxom daughter. Yet Old Luke thought rather of the tidy yew
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hedge before his place, the restingground of a dozen yellow-hammers who filched tKe straw for their homebuilding from the roof, and filled the air with colorful wings and shrill, sweet, mating cries. He thought of the fuchsia bush by his door; the tangle of old roses over the wicket gate ; the pots of blue flax and yellow myrtle, and the glory of coming happiness in Ellen's eyes.
''Aye, aye! she be i' the marnin' o' livin ', an ' I i ' the dimpsey light, ' ' the old man nodded aloud to himself, in the friendly intimacy of the open day. The sheep-bells tinkled a serene undertone to his musings, as for fifty years they had set the tune to his life. Old Luke's eyes grew younger, looking vaguely backward adown the past; a chuckle curved his lips. "Ah, well! ah, well ! dostn't 'ee mind the kirk wi' the gude folks gleekin', an' the lass wi' the blue-harebell 'een? Lang syne, Luke, lad, lang syne! You'm an old man naow ; the parson 'at married 'ee, save 'im, is kirkyard dust these forty-fi' years, an' the lass — twenty years agone! But theer's Ellen bidin' her happiness, an' the gorse as greenery an' yallery an' the
sky as blue Ess fay! 'Tis a
mazin' world, an' as flam-new today