any eminence among those I know in Western Europe. Southward the
sea-plain and the sea standing up in a belt of light against the sky,
and northward all the weald.

From this summit the eye is disturbed by no great cities of the modern
sort, but a dozen at least of those small market towns which are the
delight of South England hold the view from point to point, from the
pale blue downs of the island over, eastward, to the Kentish hills.

A very long way off, and near the sea-line, the high faint spire of that
cathedral which was once the mother of all my county goes up without
weight into the air and gathers round it the delicate and distant
outlines of the landscape--as, indeed, its builders meant that it should
do. In such a spot, on such a high watch-tower of England, I met, three
days ago, a man.

I had been riding my kind and honourable horse for two hours, broken,
indeed, by a long rest in a deserted barn.

I had been his companion, I say, for two hours, and had told him a
hundred interesting things--to which he had answered nothing at
all--when I took him along a path that neither of us yet had trod. I had
not, I know; he had not (I think), for he went snorting and doubtfully.
This path broke up from the kennels near Waltham, and made for the High
Wood between Gumber and No Man's Land. It went over dead leaves and
quite lonely to the thick of the forest; there it died out into a
vaguer and a vaguer trail. At last it ceased altogether, and for half an
hour or so I pushed carefully, always climbing upwards, through the
branches, and picked my way along the bramble-shoots, until at last I
came out upon that open space of which I had spoken, and which I have
known since my childhood. As I came out of the wood the south-west wind
met me, full of the Atlantic, and it seemed to me to blow from Paradise.

I remembered, as I halted and so gazed north and south to the weald
below me, and then again to the sea, the story of that Sultan who
publicly proclaimed that he had possessed all power on earth, and had
numbered on a tablet with his own hand each of his happy days, and had
found them, when he came to die, to be seventeen. I knew what that
heathen had meant, and I looked into my heart as I remembered the story,
but I came back from the examination satisfied, for "So far," I said to
myself, "this day is among my number, and the light is falling. I will
count it for one." It was then that I saw before me, going easi