There were no bought pleasures, and, if there had been, there was no money to pay for them; but there were the sights and sounds of the different seasons; spring with its fields of young wheat-blades bending in the wind as the cloud-shadows swept over them; summer with its ripening grain and its flowers and fruit and its thunder-storms, and how the thunder growled and rattled over that flat land and what boiling sizzling downpours it brought! With August came the harvest and the fields settled down to the long winter rest, when the snow was often piled high and frozen, so that the buried hedges could be walked over, and strange birds came for the crumbs to the cottage doors and hares in search of food left their spoor round the pigsties.........