twenty-four.
His spirit was perturbed to aching. The breezes that blew around his
mouth in that walk carried off upon them the accents of a commination.

He entered the van, where there was a fire in a stove. Without
lighting his candle he sat down at once on the three-legged stool, and
pondered on what he had seen and heard touching that still loved-one
of his. He uttered a sound which was neither sigh nor sob, but was
even more indicative than either of a troubled mind.

"My Tamsie," he whispered heavily. "What can be done? Yes, I will see
that Eustacia Vye."

X

A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion

The next morning, at the time when the height of the sun appeared very
insignificant from any part of the heath as compared with the altitude
of Rainbarrow, and when all the little hills in the lower levels were
like an archipelago in a fog-formed Aegean, the reddleman came from
the brambled nook which he had adopted as his quarters and ascended
the slopes of Mistover Knap.

Though these shaggy hills were apparently so solitary, several keen
round eyes were always ready on such a wintry morning as this to
converge upon a passer-by. Feathered species sojourned here in hiding
which would have created wonder if found elsewhere. A bustard haunted
the spot, and not many years before this five and twenty might have
been seen in Egdon at one time. Marsh-harriers looked up from the
valley by Wildeve's. A cream-coloured courser had used to visit this
hill, a bird so rare that not more than a dozen have ever been seen
in England; but a barbarian rested neither night nor day till he had
shot the African truant, and after that event cream-coloured coursers
thought fit to enter Egdon no more.

A traveller who should walk and observe any of these visitants as Venn
observed them now could feel himself to be in direct communication
with regions unknown to man. Here in front of him was a wild
mallard--just arrived from the home of the north wind. The creature
brought within him an amplitude of Northern knowledge. Glacial
catastrophes, snowstorm episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris
in the zenith, Franklin underfoot,--the category of his commonplaces
was wonderful. But the bird, like many other philosophers, seemed
as he looked at the reddleman to think that a present moment of
comfortable reality was worth a decade of memories.

Venn passed on through these towards the house of the isolated beauty
who lived up amon