n the woods. It is, in a few miles, a little England.
There are also large heaths--larger, you would think, than such a corner
of the earth could contain; old elms and oaks; many wide parks; fish
ponds; one trout stream and half a score of mills. There are men of many
characters, but all happy, honest, good, witty, and hale. And when I
have said all I could say of this delightful place (which indeed I think
is set apart for the reward of virtue) I should not have given you a
tithe of its prosperity and peace and beneficence. There is the picture
of the Valley of the River Rother. It flows in a short and happy murmur
from the confined hills by Hindhead to the Arun itself; but of the Arun
no one could write with any justice except at the expense of far more
space and time than I have given me.

If ever again we have a religion in the South Country, we will have a
temple to my darling valley. It shall be round, with columns and a wall,
and there I will hang a wreath in thanksgiving for having known the
river.

THE CORONATION

My companion said to me that there was a doom over the day and the reign
and the times, and that the turn of the nation had come. He felt it in
the sky.

The day had been troubled: from the forest ridge to the sea there was
neither wind nor sun, but a dull, even heat oppressed the fields and the
high downs under the uncertain, half-luminous confusion of grey clouds.
It was as though a relief was being denied, and as though something
inexorable had come into that air which is normally the softest and most
tender in the world. The hours of the low tide were too silent. The
little inland river was quite dead, the reeds beside it dry and
motionless; even in the trees about it no leaves stirred.

In the late afternoon, as the heat grew more masterful, a slight wind
came out of the east. It was so faint and doubtful in quantity that one
could not be certain, as one stood on the deserted shore, whether it
blew from just off the land or from the sullen level of the sea. It
followed along the line of the coast without refreshment and without
vigour, even hotter than had been the still air out of which it was
engendered. It did not do more than ruffle here and there the uneasy
surface of our sea; that surface moved a little, but with a motion
borrowed from nothing so living or so natural as the wind. It was a dull
memory of past storms, or perhaps that mysterious heaving from the lower
sands which