Nearly forty years ago, when teaching in South Wales, I often spent the summer half-holidays between noon and midnight in tracking some small tributary of the Towy to its source in the mountains; and this led me by devious ways through many solitary fields. Over and over again, when the slanting shadows were beginning to show that beautiful countryside in its most beautiful aspect—when those words of Browning's Pompilia came most inevitably home: “for never, to my mind, was evening yet but was far beautifuller than its day”—over and over again, at these moments, I found myself hailed by some lonely labourer, or by one of some small group, leaning on his hoe and crying to me across the field. It was always the same question: “What's the time of day?”—the question implicit in that verse of Job: “As a servant earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for the reward of his work.” The sunlight was not long enough for me on my half-holiday; it was too long for these labouring men; and the memory of those moments has often given deeper reality to that other biblical word: