“So those three milking under the trees seemed actually present to me for an hour. As Giles 'tugged' (how his polite diction slips from him when he gets down to the job) he would see what I saw, gazing up into that elm; gleams of near-crimson lighting the budding tips of the boughs, boughs that go gesturing up mightily form the trunk, then curve over and hang down delicately. For the eye dwells on a thing as one milks, a bit of bruised concrete, a big spider in a cobweb up in the cowhouse roof; I can see them yet. To look up into such a maze of boughs day by day, and see the bare wood bursting open with new life: wine-dark buds, then the first green, till later he sat under a roof of the small elm leaves scattering coin-like shadows all around him, such would have been Giles's lot.” SpringElm TreesBucolicPastoral LifeCow Milking Book:A Countryman's Spring Notebook Source: A Countryman's Spring Notebook