n outline
than suggestive of any ordinary American type. Finally, after having
thoroughly amused his small audience, he lifted his straw hat to the
"ladies," and lounged out across the road to the gateway. Here he
paused, consulting his guide-book, and read aloud: "St. John's
gateway. This massive structure, according to Leland, was built
in"--murmured--"never mind when; we'll pass St. John," marked the page
with his pencil, and tendering his ticket to the gate-keeper, heard,
with some satisfaction, that, as there were no other visitors just
then, and as the cicerone only accompanied PARTIES, he would be left to
himself, and at once plunged into a by-path.

It was that loveliest of rare creations--a hot summer day in England,
with all the dampness of that sea-blown isle wrung out of it, exhaled
in the quivering blue vault overhead, or passing as dim wraiths in the
distant wood, and all the long-matured growth of that great old garden
vivified and made resplendent by the fervid sun. The ashes of dead and
gone harvests, even the dust of those who had for ages wrought in it,
turned again and again through incessant cultivation, seemed to move
and live once more in that present sunshine. All color appeared to be
deepened and mellowed, until even the very shadows of the trees were as
velvety as the sward they fell upon. The prairie-bred Potter, accustomed
to the youthful caprices and extravagances of his own virgin soil, could
not help feeling the influence of the ripe restraints of this.

As he glanced through the leaves across green sunlit spaces to the
ivy-clad ruins of Domesday Abbey, which seemed itself a growth of
the very soil, he murmured to himself: "Things had been made mighty
comfortable for folks here, you bet!" Forgotten books he had read as a
boy, scraps of school histories, or rarer novels, came back to him as he
walked along, and peopled the solitude about him with their heroes.

Nevertheless, it was unmistakably hot--a heat homelike in its intensity,
yet of a different effect, throwing him into languid reverie rather than
filling his veins with fire. Secure in his seclusion in the leafy chase,
he took off his jacket and rambled on in his shirt sleeves. Through the
opening he presently saw the abbey again, with the restored wing where
the noble owner lived for two or three weeks in the year, but now given
over to the prevailing solitude. And then, issuing from the chase, he
came upon a broad, moss-grown ter