CHAPTER XIII.
WALK TO OAKHAM--THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SPRING--THE ENGLISH GENTRY- -A SPECIMEN OF THE CLASS--MELTON MOWBRAY AND ITS SPECIALITIES-- BELVOIR VALE AND ITS BEAUTY--THOUGHTS ON THE BLIND PAINTER.
From Stamford to Oakham was an afternoon walk which I greatly enjoyed.

This was the first week of harvest, and the first of August.

How wonderfully the seasons are localised and subdivided.
How diversified is the economy of light and heat! That field of wheat, thick, tall and ripe for the sickle, was green and apparently growing through all the months of last winter.

What a phenomenon it would have been, on the first of February last, to a New England farmer, suddenly transported from his snow-buried hills to the view of this landscape the same day! Not a spire of grass or grain was alive when he left his own homestead.

All was cold and dead.