THE COUNTRY SUNDAY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue XX, 16 November 1895, Page 622

THE COUNTRY SUNDAY.

There is always (says a writer in the Cornhill Magazine) a strange calm and peacefulness about the country Sunday—an air of quiet and rest. How far imagination carries me away I do not know, but on this Fifth Sunday after Lent the sun seems to shine a little more brightly than it does on weekdays ; the animals seem to know it is Sunday, and one might think the birds knew it too, were they not now so busy either building nests or hatching early clutches of eggs that they appear to have temporarily forgotten all about it. They will remember it again in the warm hazy Sundays of late summer and early autumn. Partridges surely know it well at that season, laying on a Sunday until you almost walk on to the top of the covey. And the outlying pheasants, which wander along the hedgerows in seat ch of blackberries and acorns, really seem on Sunday mornings as if they had forgotten all their cunning ways of running down one hedge and up another, and so on, at the first alarm, and so going right off the beat. I seem to notice this difference in their behaviour ; is it all merely fancy ? It is certainly on Sunday, when 1 have no gun, that stray snipe got up out of the brook under my very nose. The farm horses know Sunday well enough ; they are free to rest their feet on the cool grass the livelong day, free to roll on the sward, to do nothing but munch, munch at the short turf from morning until night, and to look complacently at the carter in his Sucday clothes, taking his rest too. Carter likes to bend the steps of the afternoon stroll across by the farm he works on. He likes * the missus ’to see how well •my harses ’ are looking. Our dogs know Sunday, perhaps by the sound of the bells. They trot about a little listlessly in the morning, and when the bells have done chiming watch the party walking down to the gate wistfully, almost sadly, without attempting to follow. Only an old bull ten ier never could be brought to see that his company is not at all times desirable. He conies over the wall and follows quietly, so that his presence is not detected until we are within the church porch. Nor would he be denied the church itself were he not carried all the way home and safely shut in the stables. But, as a rule, dogs know church-time perfectly, and their behaviour in the afternoon, on our appearance in a tweed coat, is entirely different, exuberant joy taking the place of sad resignment.