Far down the road towards the Orchards a dim veil of gold was spreading behind the walls of mist; the sparrows on the almond tree near his window chattered like the girls of the High School, and blue shadows stole into the dim grey sky, just as light breaks upon an early morning sea; the air was warm behind the outer wall of the frosty morning, and the faint gold of the first crocus beneath the garden wall near the pantry door, where always the first crocuses came, caught his eye.

Even as he watched the sun burst the mist, the trees changed from dim grey to sharp black, the blue flooded the sky, and the Cathedral beyond the trees shone like a house of crystal.
All this meant spring, and spring meant hunting for snowdrops in the Meads.

Jeremy informed Miss Jones, and Miss Jones was, of course, agreeable.

They would walk that way after luncheon.
The Meads fall in a broad green slope from the old Cathedral battlement down to the River Pol.

Their long stretches of meadow are scattered with trees, some of the oldest oaks in Glebeshire, and they are finally bounded by the winding path of the Rope Walk that skirts the river bank.
Along the Rope Walk in March and April the daffodils first, and the primroses afterwards, are so thick that, from the Cathedral walls, the Rope Walk looks as though it wandered between pools and lakes of gold.
In the Orchards on the hill also they run like rivers.
Upon this afternoon there were only the trees, faintly pink, along the river and the wide unbroken carpet of green.