this petty and unadventurous, and
would think the worse of me for it."

She smiled at me caressingly as she spoke, and I made haste to answer:
"O, no, indeed; again you echo my very thoughts. But I hardly expected
to hear you speak so. I gathered from all I have heard that there was a
great deal of changing of abode amongst you in this country."

"Well," she said, "of course people are free to move about; but except
for pleasure-parties, especially in harvest and hay-time, like this of
ours, I don't think they do so much. I admit that I also have other
moods than that of stay-at-home, as I hinted just now, and I should like
to go with you all through the west country--thinking of nothing,"
concluded she smiling.

"I should have plenty to think of," said I.

CHAPTER XXIX: A RESTING-PLACE ON THE UPPER THAMES

Presently at a place where the river flowed round a headland of the
meadows, we stopped a while for rest and victuals, and settled ourselves
on a beautiful bank which almost reached the dignity of a hill-side: the
wide meadows spread before us, and already the scythe was busy amidst the
hay. One change I noticed amidst the quiet beauty of the fields--to wit,
that they were planted with trees here and there, often fruit-trees, and
that there was none of the niggardly begrudging of space to a handsome
tree which I remembered too well; and though the willows were often
polled (or shrowded, as they call it in that country-side), this was done
with some regard to beauty: I mean that there was no polling of rows on
rows so as to destroy the pleasantness of half a mile of country, but a
thoughtful sequence in the cutting, that prevented a sudden bareness
anywhere. To be short, the fields were everywhere treated as a garden
made for the pleasure as well as the livelihood of all, as old Hammond
told me was the case.

On this bank or bent of the hill, then, we had our mid-day meal; somewhat
early for dinner, if that mattered, but we had been stirring early: the
slender stream of the Thames winding below us between the garden of a
country I have been telling of; a furlong from us was a beautiful little
islet begrown with graceful trees; on the slopes westward of us was a
wood of varied growth overhanging the narrow meadow on the south side of
the river; while to the north was a wide stretch of mead rising very
gradually from the river's edge. A delicate spire of an ancient building
rose up from out of the tr