Publisher's Synopsis
Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky-shepherdless, futile, imponderable-and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.It was cold in the Callow-a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph-only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.
