t from Dryhopedale to Knapp Forest
she stood at the farmhouse door with a child in her arms. Two others
were tumbling about in the croft. She was a pretty, serious girl--for
she looked quite a girl--with a round face and large greyish-blue
eyes. She had a pink cotton dress on, and a good figure beneath it.
She was pale, but looked healthy and strong. Not a tall girl. I asked
her the best way to Knapp Forest and she came out to the gate to point
it to me. She talked simply, with a northern accent, and might have
been the child of generations of borderers. She pointed me the very
track by which Andrew King must have brought her home, by which the
King of the Wood swept her out on the wings of his wrath; she named
the tarn where once she dwelt as the spirit of a tree. All this
without a flush, a tremor or a sign in her blue eyes that she had ever
known the place. But these people are close, and seldom betray all
that they know or think.

OREADS

I end this little book with an experience of my own, or rather a
series of experiences, and will leave conclusions to a final chapter.
I don't say that I have no others which could have found a
place--indeed, there are many others. But they were fitful, momentary
things, unaccountable and unrelated to each other, without the main
clue which in itself is too intimate a thing to be revealed just yet,
and I am afraid of compiling a catalogue. I have travelled far and
wide across Europe in my day, not without spiritual experiences. If at
some future time these co-ordinate into a body of doctrine I will take
care to clothe that body in the vesture of print and paper. Here,
meantime, is something of recent years.

My house at Broad Chalke stands in a narrow valley, which a little
stream waters more than enough. This valley is barely a mile broad
throughout its length, and in my village scarcely half so much. I can
be in the hills in a quarter of an hour, and in five-and-twenty
minutes find myself deeply involved, out of sight of man or his
contrivances. The downs in South Wilts are nowhere lofty, and have
none of the abrupt grandeur of those which guard the Sussex coast and
weald; but they are of much larger extent, broader, longer, more
untrodden, made much more intricate by the numberless creeks and
friths which, through some dim cycle of antiquity, the sea, ebbing
gradually to the great Avon delta, must have graved. Beautiful, with
quiet and a solemn peacefulness of their