Walking by the hedge-side he picked and devoured the late
blackberries, which were still abundant. It was a beautiful
unkept hedge with scarlet and purple fruit among the
many-coloured fading leaves and silver-grey down of old-man's-
beard.
I too picked and ate a few berries and made the remark that it
was late to eat such fruit in November. The Devil in these
parts, I told him, flies abroad in October to spit on the
bramble bushes and spoil the fruit. It was even worse further
north, in Norfolk and Suffolk, where they say the Devil goes
out at Michaelmas and shakes his verminous trousers over the
bushes.
He didn't smile; he went on sternly eating blackberries, and
then remarked in a bitter tone, "That Devil they talk about
must have a busy time, to go messing about blackberry bushes
in addition to all his other important work."
I was silent, and presently, after swallowing a few more
berries, he resumed in the same tone: "Very fine, very
beautiful all this"--waving his hand to indicate the hedge,
its rich tangle of purple-red stems and coloured leaves, and
scarlet fruit and silvery oldman's-beard. "An artist enjoys
seeing this sort of thing, and it's nice for all those who go
about just for the pleasure of seeing things. But when it
comes to a man tramping twenty or thirty miles a day on an
empty belly, looking for work which he can't find, he doesn't
see it quite in the same way.
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