ed the incline. A clock struck seven, and
round the shady lime-tree a chafer or some heavy insect commenced its
booming rushes. All was marvellously sane and slumbrous. The soft
air, the drawling voices, the shapes and murmurs, the rising smell of
wood-smoke from fresh-kindled fires--were full of the spirit of security
and of home. The outside world was far indeed. Typical of some island
nation was this nest of refuge--where men grew quietly tall, fattened,
and without fuss dropped off their perches; where contentment
flourished, as sunflowers flourished in the sun.

Crocker's cap slipped off; he was nodding, and Shelton looked at him.
From a manor house in some such village he had issued; to one of a
thousand such homes he would find his way at last, untouched by the
struggles with famines or with plagues, uninfected in his fibre, his
prejudices, and his principles, unchanged by contact with strange
peoples, new conditions, odd feelings, or queer points of view!

The chafer buzzed against his shoulder, gathered flight again, and
boomed away. Crocker roused himself, and, turning his amiable face,
jogged Shelton's arm.

"What are you thinking about, Bird?" he asked.

CHAPTER XVII

A PARSON

Shelton continued to travel with his college friend, and on Wednesday
night, four days after joining company, they reached the village of
Dowdenhame. All day long the road had lain through pastureland, with
thick green hedges and heavily feathered elms. Once or twice they had
broken the monotony by a stretch along the towing-path of a canal,
which, choked with water-lily plants and shining weeds, brooded
sluggishly beside the fields. Nature, in one of her ironic moods, had
cast a grey and iron-hard cloak over all the country's bland luxuriance.
From dawn till darkness fell there had been no movement in the steely
distant sky; a cold wind ruffed in the hedge-tops, and sent shivers
through the branches of the elms. The cattle, dappled, pied, or bay, or
white, continued grazing with an air of grumbling at their birthright.
In a meadow close to the canal Shelton saw five magpies, and about five
o'clock the rain began, a steady, coldly-sneering rain, which Crocker,
looking at the sky, declared was going to be over in a minute. But it
was not over in a minute; they were soon drenched. Shelton was tired,
and it annoyed him very much that his companion, who was also tired,
should grow more cheerful. His thoughts kept harping upon