The avenue is quite alive to-day. Old women are picking up twigs and
acorns, and pigs of all sizes doing their utmost to spare them the
latter part of the trouble; boys and girls groping for beech-nuts under
yonder clump; and a group of younger elves collecting as many dead
leaves as they can find to feed the bonfire which is smoking away so
briskly amongst the trees,--a sort of rehearsal of the grand bonfire
nine days hence; of the loyal conflagration of the arch-traitor Guy
Vaux, which is annually solemnised in the avenue, accompanied with as
much of squibbery and crackery as our boys can beg or borrow--not to say
steal. Ben Kirby is a great man on the 5th of November. All the
savings of a month, the hoarded halfpence, the new farthings, the very
luck-penny, go off in fumo on that night. For my part, I like this
daylight mockery better. There is no gunpowder--odious gunpowder! no
noise but the merry shouts of the small fry, so shrill and happy, and
the cawing of the rooks, who are wheeling in large circles overhead,
and wondering what is going forward in their territory--seeming in
their loud clamour to ask what that light smoke may mean that curls
so prettily amongst their old oaks, towering as if to meet the clouds.
There is something very intelligent in the ways of that black people
the rooks, particularly in their wonder. I suppose it results from their
numbers and their unity of purpose, a sort of collective and corporate
wisdom. Yet geese congregate also; and geese never by any chance look
wise. But then geese are a domestic fowl; we have spoiled them; and
rooks are free commoners of nature, who use the habitations we provide
for them, tenant our groves and our avenues, but never dream of becoming
our subjects.

What a labyrinth of a road this is! I do think there are four turnings
in the short half-mile between the avenue and the mill. And what a pity,
as my companion observes--not that our good and jolly miller, the very
representative of the old English yeomanry, should be so rich, but
that one consequence of his riches should be the pulling down of the
prettiest old mill that ever looked at itself in the Loddon, with
the picturesque, low-browed, irregular cottage, which stood with its
light-pointed roof, its clustered chimneys, and its ever-open door,
looking like the real abode of comfort and hospitality, to build this
huge, staring, frightful, red-brick mill, as ugly as a manufactory, and
this great sq