AN EVANGELIST


Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with
'nothing to see'; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a
pleasant, vague picture of the town and all its surroundings.  I
might have dodged happily enough all day about the main street and
up to the castle and in and out of byways, but the curious
attraction that leads a person in a strange place to follow, day
after day, the same round, and to make set habits for himself in a
week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up the same, road that
I had gone the evening before.  When I came up to the hat
manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate.  He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put
to await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he
looked something like the typical Jew old-clothes man.  As I drew
near, he came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so
curious an expression on his face that I instinctively prepared
myself to apologise for some unwitting trespass.  His first
question rather confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or
not he had seen me going up this way last night; and after having
answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm for the rest of
my indictment.  But the good man's heart was full of peace; and he
stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about fishing, and
walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright shallow
stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how.  As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats
aside to go along the water-side and show me where the large trout
commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much
disappointed, for my sake, that there were none visible just then.
Then he wandered off on to another tack, and stood a great while
out in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to make
out that he had known me before, or, if not me, some friend of
mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel more
friendly and at our ease with one another.  At last he made a
little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the
best writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only
the sense, and that perhaps imperfectly.  He began by saying that
he had little things in his past life that it gave him especial
pleasure to recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp
impressions had now died out in himself, but must at my age be
still quite lively and active.  Then he told me that he had a
little raft afloat on the river above the dam which he was going to
lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in after
years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the
recollection.  Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo
present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing 'a reminiscence' for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker
found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or
unselfish luxury can be imagined.  After he had unmoored his little
embarkation, and seen me safely shoved off into midstream, he ran
away back to his hats with the air of a man who had only just
recollected that he had anything to do.

I did not stay very long on the raft.  It ought to have been very
nice punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting
moored to an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I
was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and
cherish its recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure
into a duty.  Be that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon
wearied and came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure
to recall the man himself and his simple, happy conversation, so
full of gusto and sympathy, than anything possibly connected with
his crank, insecure embarkation.  In order to avoid seeing him, for
I was not a little ashamed of myself for having failed to enjoy his
treat sufficiently, I determined to continue up the river, and, at
all prices, to find some other way back into the town in time for
dinner.  As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a
look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the smiling
champaign of his past life, and very different from the Sinai-
gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men.  I cannot be
very grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and
prudence.  I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard,
combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, defeats,
disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard enough life without
their dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a
happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners of my
life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment.


ANOTHER


I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp.  After I
had forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the
high road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the
top of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom.
An Irish beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side,
came up to ask for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the
little tragedy of her life.  Her own sister, she told me, had
seduced her husband from her after many years of married life, and
the pair had fled, leaving her destitute, with the little girl upon
her hands.  She seemed quite hopeful and cheery, and, though she
was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her husband's earnings, she
made no pretence of despair at the loss of his affection; some day
she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see her duly
righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
gratefully received.  While she was telling all this in the most
matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man,
with a high white hat and darkish clothes.  He came up the hill at
a rapid pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half-
salutation.  Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a
business-like way whether she had anything to do, whether she were
a Catholic or a Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth;
and then, after a few kind words and some sweeties to the child, he
despatched the mother with some tracts about Biddy and the Priest,
and the Orangeman's Bible.  I was a little amused at his abrupt
manner, for he was still a young man, and had somewhat the air of a
navy officer; but he tackled me with great solemnity.  I could make
fun of what he said, for I do not think it was very wise; but the
subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting light, so I
shall only say that he related to me his own conversion, which had
been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency of a
gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my
case, he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave
them to me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.


LAST OF SMETHURST


That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for
Keswick, and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in
brown clothes.  This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease,
and kept continually putting his head out of the window, and asking
the bystanders if they saw HIM coming.  At last, when the train was
already in motion, there was a commotion on the platform, and a way
was left clear to our carriage door.  HE had arrived.  In the hurry
I could just see Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of
clay pipes into my companion's outstretched band, and hear him
crying his farewells after us as we slipped out of the station at
an ever accelerating pace.  I said something about it being a close
run, and the broad man, already engaged in filling one of the
pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of his own stupidity in
forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had good-naturedly
gone down town at the last moment to supply the omission.  I
mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had
been very polite to me; and we fell into a discussion of the
hatter's merits that lasted some time and left us quite good
friends at its conclusion.  The topic was productive of goodwill.
We exchanged tobacco and talked about the season, and agreed at
last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick and sup in
company.  As he had some business in the town which would occupy
him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time and
go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
wonders.

The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a
place where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and
as I went along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind
blew in gusts from the far end of the lake.  The sky was covered
with flying scud; and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild
chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering
water.  I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and
inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to
break the tedium.  A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the
low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief
discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made,
and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder.
It was as though they had sprung out of the ground.  I accosted
them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to be
told the names of all manner of hills and woods and places that I
did not wish to know, and we stood together for a while and had an
amusing little talk.  The wind, too, made himself of the party,
brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do to
repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
specially strong gust had got the advantage over her.  They were
just high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak
to a gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a
nervous consciousness of wrong-doing--of stolen waters, that gave a
considerable zest to our most innocent interview.  They were as
much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked
baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no
inclination to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and
waterfalls and on to more promising subjects, when a young man was
descried coming along the path from the direction of Keswick.  Now
whether he was the young man of one of my friends, or the brother
of one of them, or indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but
they incontinently said that they must be going, and went away up
the path with friendly salutations.  I need not say that I found
the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure, and
speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water
in the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller.  In the
smoking-room there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an
ulster coat, who had got the best place and was monopolising most
of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to me from
both sides, that this was the manager of a London theatre.  The
presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must
own that the manager showed himself equal to his position.  He had
a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced poem after poem,
written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing could
be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant extracts,
except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
entertainment.  Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with
one little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
confirmation.  The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the
elbows with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of
that great man settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as
noticeably the second person in the smoking-room as he was the
first.  For a young man, this was a position of some distinction, I
think you will admit. . . .



CHAPTER III--AN AUTUMN EFFECT--1875



'Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous
en avons recue.'--M. ANDRE THEURIET, 'L'Automne dans les Bois,'
Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. {2}


A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may
leave upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed
and dissipated if we stayed longer.  Clear vision goes with the
quick foot.  Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective
when we see them for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and
simply, and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain
falls, before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his
figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards
nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
they showed us in the morning.  We expose our mind to the landscape
(as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before
the effect can change.  Hence we shall have in our memories a long
scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the
prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape,
and certain to be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the
unconscious processes of thought.  So that we who have only looked
at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will
have a conception of it far more memorable and articulate than a
man who has lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had
his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow, and belied
by that of the day after, till at length the stable characteristics
of the country are all blotted out from him behind the confusion of
variable effect.

I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours:
that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack,
turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which
he knows only by the vague report of others.  Such an one has not
surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles,
like a man on a railway.  He may change his mind at every finger-
post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go
the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine,
suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately
into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into
the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon.  In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy,
without a pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his
self-respect.  It is true, however, that most men do not possess
the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of being able to
live for the moment only; and as they begin to go forward on their
journey, they will find that they have made for themselves new
fetters.  Slight projects they may have entertained for a moment,
half in jest, become iron laws to them, they know not why.  They
will be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke
above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned one village
and not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable
power.  And yet a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious
liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling on
them to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or
unworthy expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and
lead them back into the old paths.  Once and again we have all made
the experiment.  We know the end of it right well.  And yet if we
make it for the hundredth time to-morrow:  it will have the same
charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we
have felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for
ever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and
circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new
world.

It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day
for walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull,
heavy, and lifeless.  A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its
colour reacted on the colour of the landscape.  Near at hand,
indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through
with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine.  But a little way
off, the solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and
hill-top were not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet
and more grey as they drew off into the distance.  As they drew off
into the distance, also, the woods seemed to mass themselves
together, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon the limit of
one's view.  Not that this massing was complete, or gave the idea
of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long
Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly
enough, against the sky.  I say foolishly enough, although I have
seen the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long line of
single trees thrown out against the customary sunset of a Japanese
picture with a certain fantastic effect that was not to be
despised; but this was over water and level land, where it did not
jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys.  The
whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour
was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and
merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon
that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
landscape.  For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to
art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, 'How like a
picture!' for once that we say, 'How like the truth!'  The forms in
which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
from painted canvas.  Any man can see and understand a picture; it
is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion
of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.

The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened
considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey
and cold, and the distance I could see no longer.  Overhead there
was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as I
went.  Indeed, during all the time I was in that country the larks
did not desert me.  The air was alive with them from High Wycombe
to Tring; and as, day after day, their 'shrill delight' fell upon
me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of
the country, that I could have baptized it 'The Country of Larks.'
This, of course, might just as well have been in early spring; but
everything else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later
year.  There was no stir of insects in the grass.  The sunshine was
more golden, and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the
shadows under the hedge were somewhat blue and misty.  It was only
in autumn that you could have seen the mingled green and yellow of
the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and
covered the surface of wayside pools so thickly that the sun was
reflected only here and there from little joints and pinholes in
that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would have been
troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of fowling-
pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.

For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human
activity that came to disturb me as I walked.  The lanes were
profoundly still.  They would have been sad but for the sunshine
and the singing of the larks.  And as it was, there came over me at
times a feeling of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was
enough to make me quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some one
before me on the road.  This fellow-voyager proved to be no less a
person than the parish constable.  It had occurred to me that in a
district which was so little populous and so well wooded, a
criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and-seek with the
authorities for months; and this idea was strengthened by the
aspect of the portly constable as he walked by my side with
deliberate dignity and turned-out toes.  But a few minutes'
converse set my heart at rest.  These rural criminals are very tame
birds, it appeared.  If my informant did not immediately lay his
hand on an offender, he was content to wait; some evening after
nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the outlaw, weary
of outlawry, would give himself quietly up to undergo sentence, and
resume his position in the life of the country-side.  Married men
caused him no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by the foot.
Sooner or later they would come back to see their wives, a peeping
neighbour would pass the word, and my portly constable would walk
quietly over and take the bird sitting.  And if there were a few
who had no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and preferred to
shift into another county when they fell into trouble, their
departure moved the placid constable in no degree.  He was of
Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not stand in the Prince's
name, he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked God he
was rid of a knave.  And surely the crime and the law were in
admirable keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic
offender.  The officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the
criminal came to visit him, and the criminal coming--it was a fair
match.  One felt as if this must have been the order in that
delightful seaboard Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in
such sweet accents, and the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and
the four-and-twenty shearers danced with nosegays in their bosoms,
and chanted their three songs apiece at the old shepherd's
festival; and one could not help picturing to oneself what havoc
among good peoples purses, and tribulation for benignant
constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and
footpath, of a new Autolycus.

Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and
struck across country.  It was rather a revelation to pass from
between the hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a
great coming and going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in
every second field, lusty horses and stout country-folk a-
ploughing.  The way I followed took me through many fields thus
occupied, and through many strips of plantation, and then over a
little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with
tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making ready for the
winter, and so back again into the quiet road.  I was now not far
from the end of my day's journey.  A few hundred yards farther,
and, passing through a gap in the hedge, I began to go down hill
through a pretty extensive tract of young beeches.  I was soon in
shadow myself, but the afternoon sun still coloured the upmost
boughs of the wood, and made a fire over my head in the autumnal
foliage.  A little faint vapour lay among the slim tree-stems in
the bottom of the hollow; and from farther up I heard from time to
time an outburst of gross laughter, as though clowns were making
merry in the bush.  There was something about the atmosphere that
brought all sights and sounds home to one with a singular purity,
so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with water.  After I
had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began to remount the
hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got back again,
from the head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in
front of me a donkey tied to a tree.  Now, I have a certain liking
for donkeys, principally, I believe, because of the delightful
things that Sterne has written of them.  But this was not after the
pattern of the ass at Lyons.  He was of a white colour, that seemed
to fit him rather for rare festal occasions than for constant
drudgery.  Besides, he was very small, and of the daintiest
portions you can imagine in a donkey.  And so, sure enough, you had
only to look at him to see he had never worked.  There was
something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that
of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling.
It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children
oftener than they had plodded with a freight through miry lanes.
He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and
though he was just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still
gave proof of the levity of his disposition by impudently wagging
his ears at me as I drew near.  I say he was somewhat solemnised
just then; for, with the admirable instinct of all men and animals
under restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter about the
tree that he could go neither back nor forwards, nor so much as put
down his head to browse.  There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled,
part angry, part, I believe, amused.  He had not given up hope, and
dully revolved the problem in his head, giving ever and again
another jerk at the few inches of free rope that still remained
unwound.  A humorous sort of sympathy for the creature took hold
upon me.  I went up, and, not without some trouble on my part, and
much distrust and resistance on the part of Neddy, got him forced
backwards until the whole length of the halter was set loose, and
he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to make him.  I was
pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to a fellow-
creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see
how he was profiting by his freedom.  The brute was looking after
me; and no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long white
face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to
bray derisively.  If ever any one person made a grimace at another,
that donkey made a grimace at me.  The hardened ingratitude of his
behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his whole face as he
curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and began to bray, so
tickled me, and was so much in keeping with what I had imagined to
myself about his character, that I could not find it in my heart to
be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter.  This seemed to
strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way of
rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until
I began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell,
turned to pursue my way.  In so doing--it was like going suddenly
into cold water--I found myself face to face with a prim little old
maid.  She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear!  She had
concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood
laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods.  I was
sure, by her face, that she had already recommended her spirit most
religiously to Heaven, and prepared herself for the worst.  And so,
to reassure her, I uncovered and besought her, after a very staid
fashion, to put me on my way to Great Missenden.  Her voice
trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at
rest; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the path until I
came to the end of the wood, and then I should see the village
below me in the bottom of the valley.  And, with mutual courtesies,
the little old maid and I went on our respective ways.

Nor had she misled me.  Great Missenden was close at hand, as she
had said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms
about it.  The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the
afternoon sunshine.  The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled
the neighbouring fields and hung about the quaint street corners.
A little above, the church sits well back on its haunches against
the hillside--an attitude for a church, you know, that makes it
look as if it could be ever so much higher if it liked; and the
trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a density of shade in
the churchyard.  A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many
boards and posters about threatening dire punishment against those
who broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, and offering
rewards for the apprehension of those who had done the like
already.  It was fair day in Great Missenden.  There were three
stalls set up, sub jove, for the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and
a great number of holiday children thronged about the stalls and
noisily invaded every corner of the straggling village.  They came
round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously upon penny trumpets as
though they imagined I should fall to pieces like the battlements
of Jericho.  I noticed one among them who could make a wheel of
himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-
eminence upon the strength of the accomplishment.  By and by,
however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors,
leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height.

Night had fallen before I ventured forth again.  It was pitch-dark
in the village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for
a light here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open
door.  Into one such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw
within a charming genre picture.  In a room, all white wainscot and
crimson wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, empty
darkness in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a
story, as well as I could make out, to an attentive child upon her
knee, while an old woman sat placidly dozing over the fire.  You
may be sure I was not behindhand with a story for myself--a good
old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and the village
melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney,
and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should
love, and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson
room.  Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we
are inspired with when we look through a window into other people's
lives; and I think Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same text.
The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom weary of
entertaining.  I remember, night after night, at Brussels, watching
a good family sup together, make merry, and retire to rest; and
night after night I waited to see the candles lit, and the salad
made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without any
abatement of interest.  Night after night I found the scene rivet
my attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint
imaginations.  Much of the pleasure of the Arabian Nights hinges
upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other
people's roofs, and going about behind the scenes of life with the
Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar.  It is a salutary exercise,
besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves and see people
living together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence, as
they will live when we are gone.  If to-morrow the blow falls, and
the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none the less
tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their
salad, and go orderly to bed.

The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a
thrill in the air like a reminiscence of frost.  I went up into the
sloping garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough,
to the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars.  She had been
so much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
hovered over by white butterflies.  And now, look at the end of it!
She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense.  And, indeed,
unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the
composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide
intelligibly upon the issue raised.  Then I fell into a long and
abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box
of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself.  We
tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary
allowance for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a
triumphant conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small
lacuna in my information.  I did not know the circumference of the
earth.  The landlord knew it, to be sure--plainly he had made the
same calculation twice and once before,--but he wanted confidence
in his own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a
second seemed to lose all interest in the result.

Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with
Great Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off
on either hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain
lies, like a sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had
a good outlook over the place.  The vale, as it opened out into the
plain, was shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of
graceful convolutions.  From the level to which I have now attained
the fields were exposed before me like a map, and I could see all
that bustle of autumn field-work which had been hid from me
yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as
I followed the footpath.  Wendover lay well down in the midst, with
mountains of foliage about it.  The great plain stretched away to
the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of
the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river,
and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the
ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon.  The sky was an opal-grey,
touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets
that looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the
autumnal woods below.  I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their
horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and,
from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells.  All these noises came to me very
thin and distinct in the clear air.  There was a wonderful
sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.

I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky
footholds cut in the turf.  The hills about Wendover and, as far as
I could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood
of beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and
hung down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of
lying flatly along the summit.  The trees grew so close, and their
boughs were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense
as a bush of heather.  The prevailing colour was a dull,
smouldering red, touched here and there with vivid yellow.  But the
autumn had scarce advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost
summer in the heart of the wood; and as soon as I had scrambled
through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green forest atmosphere
under eaves of virgin foliage.  In places where the wood had itself
for a background and the trees were massed together thickly, the
colour became intensified and almost gem-like:  a perfect fire
green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
gold.  None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned
and wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke
the light up pleasantly.  Sometimes there would be a colonnade of
slim, straight tree-stems with the light running down them as down
the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to
something, and led only to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle.
Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the
light lying flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark
background it seemed almost luminous.  There was a great bush over
the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood);
and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the
occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth,
had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet
carpeting of last year's leaves.  The spirit of the place seemed to
be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath
to number my footfalls.  One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves.  It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
the open plain.  This happened only where the path lay much upon
the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the
wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to
be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller,
and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward,
and so shift my point of view.

For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in
the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream.  As I
advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and
I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure
walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard.  And sure enough,
a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with
the beech-woods growing almost to the door of it.  Just before me,
however, as I came upon the path, the trees drew back and let in a
wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn.  It was here that the
noises had their origin.  More than a score of peacocks (there are
altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, and
a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary barn-
door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
among the beeches.  They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and
fro, and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which
the surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird
guzzled his head along the ground after the scattered corn.  The
clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither was formed by the
blending together of countless expressions of individual
contentment into one collective expression of contentment, or
general grace during meat.  Every now and again a big peacock would
separate himself from the mob and take a stately turn or two about
the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon the rail, and there
shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with himself and what
he had to eat.  It happened, for my sins, that none of these
admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then.  But they had their
necks for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much
surpass all the other birds of our grey climate as they fall in
quality of song below the blackbird or the lark.  Surely the
peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the
scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted
throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden,
have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and
support of homely virtue:  or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not
quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a
studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these
melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would
have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all
the spring woods.  For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of
a man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres
of stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown
ploughlands and white roads, was like going three whole days'
journey to the southward, or a month back into the summer.

I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm--for so the place is called,
after the name of its splendid pensioners--and go forwards again in
the quiet woods.  It began to grow both damp and dusk under the
beeches; and as the day declined the colour faded out of the
foliage; and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all
the fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of living green
that had before accompanied my walk.  I had been sorry to leave
Peacock Farm, but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the
open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky,
and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.

Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street
should go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen
with a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of
neighbours to join in his heresy.  It would have somewhat the look
of an abortive watering-place, such as we may now see them here and
there along the coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely
quiet design of some of them, and the look of long habitation, of a
life that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth while to train
flowers about the windows, and otherwise shape the dwelling to the
humour of the inhabitant.  The church, which might perhaps have
served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and pulled the
township into something like intelligible unity, stands some
distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the public
buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be the
principal street:  a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and
three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the
eaves.

The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside:  indeed, I
never saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted
parlour in which I spent the remainder of the evening.  It was a
short oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built across one
of the angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle
was similarly truncated by a corner cupboard.  The wainscot was
white, and there was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it
might have been imported by Walter Shandy before he retired, worn
almost through in some places, but in others making a good show of
blues and oranges, none the less harmonious for being somewhat
faded.  The corner cupboard was agreeable in design; and there were
just the right things upon the shelves--decanters and tumblers, and
blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water.  The furniture
was old-fashioned and stiff.  Everything was in keeping, down to
the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table.  And you may
fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over by the
light of a brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted
sort of perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror
above the chimney.  As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept
looking round with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture
that was about me, and could not help some pleasure and a certain
childish pride in forming part of it.  The book I read was about
Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves
of princes, the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art;
but it was written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion,
that suited the room infinitely more nearly than the matter; and
the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or
Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had written
in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure in
his solemn polysyllables.

I was not left without society.  My landlord had a very pretty
little daughter, whom we shall call Lizzie.  If I had made any
notes at the time, I might be able to tell you something definite
of her appearance.  But faces have a trick of growing more and more
spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of
them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in
a face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest
painter's touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it.
And if it is hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair pencils,
you may think how hopeless it must be to pursue after it with
clumsy words.  If I say, for instance, that this look, which I
remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed partly to
come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined
to imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion of a
cast in one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can,
and the reader will not be much advanced towards comprehension.  I
had struck up an acquaintance with this little damsel in the
morning, and professed much interest in her dolls, and an impatient
desire to see the large one which was kept locked away for great
occasions.  And so I had not been very long in the parlour before
the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked
clumsily under her arm.  She was followed by her brother John, a
year or so younger than herself, not simply to play propriety at
our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation of his
sister's dolls.  I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' dresses,
and, with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about
their age and character.  I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my
sincerity, but it was evident that she was both bewildered and a
little contemptuous.  Although she was ready herself to treat her
dolls as if they were alive, she seemed to think rather poorly of
any grown person who could fall heartily into the spirit of the
fiction.  Sometimes she would look at me with gravity and a sort of
disquietude, as though she really feared I must be out of my wits.
Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly into the question of
their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily that I began to
feel almost embarrassed.  But when, in an evil moment, I asked to
be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no longer to
herself.  Clambering down from the chair on which she sat perched
to show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of the
room and into the bar--it was just across the passage,--and I could
hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in
sorrow than in merriment, that THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR WANTED
TO KISS DOLLY.  I fancy she was determined to save me from this
humiliating action, even in spite of myself, for she never gave me
the desired permission.  She reminded me of an old dog I once knew,
who would never suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an
exaggerated sense of the dignity of that master's place and
carriage.

After the young people were gone there was but one more incident
ere I went to bed.  I heard a party of children go up and down the
dark street for a while, singing together sweetly.  And the mystery
of this little incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely
refrained from asking who they were, and wherefore they went
singing at so late an hour.  One can rarely be in a pleasant place
without meeting with some pleasant accident.  I have a conviction
that these children would not have gone singing before the inn
unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful place it was.  At
least, if I had been in the customary public room of the modern
hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears would
have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or other
uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
upon an unworthy hearer.

Next morning I went along to visit the church.  It is a long-backed
red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a
pleasant graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken
already.  The sky was drowned in a mist.  Now and again pulses of
cold wind went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy
overhead, and the dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the
church buttresses.  Now and again, also, I could hear the dull
sudden fall of a chestnut among the grass--the dog would bark
before the rectory door--or there would come a clinking of pails
from the stable-yard behind.  But in spite of these occasional
interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn twittering
that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one as of
utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some
possible and more inharmonious disturbance.  The grass was wet, as
if with a hoar frost that had just been melted.  I do not know that
ever I saw a morning more autumnal.  As I went to and fro among the
graves, I saw some flowers set reverently before a recently erected
tomb, and drawing near, was almost startled to find they lay on the
grave a man seventy-two years old when he died.  We are accustomed
to strew flowers only over the young, where love has been cut short
untimely, and great possibilities have been restrained by death.
We strew them there in token, that these possibilities, in some
deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of our dead
loves remain with us and guide us to the end.  And yet there was
more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in
this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old.  We are
apt to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of
the enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to
lament for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love,
than in one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and
goes about the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy,
or any consolation.  These flowers seemed not so much the token of
love that survived death, as of something yet more beautiful--of
love that had lived a man's life out to an end with him, and been
faithful and companionable, and not weary of loving, throughout all
these years.