lking. In front of him the
long road with its gleaming pools bent sharply to the left, showing pale
and distinct against a darkening heaven and the wide grey fields which
had now, on one side of his path, replaced the serried growth of young
plantations. Night was fast advancing from south and east over the
upland. But straight in front of him and on his right, the forest trees,
still flooded with sunset, fell in sharp steeps towards the plain.
Through their straight stems glowed the blues and purples of that lower
world; and when the slopes broke and opened here and there, above the
rounded masses of their red and golden leaf the level distances of the
plain could be seen stretching away, illimitable in the evening dusk, to
a west of glory, just vacant of the sun. The golden ball had sunk into
the mists awaiting it, but the splendour of its last rays was still on
all the western front of the hills, bathing the beech woods as they rose
and fell with the large undulations of the ground.

Insensibly Raeburn, filled as he was with a new and surging emotion,
drew the solemnity of the forest glades and of the rolling distances
into his heart. When he reached the point where the road diverged to the
left, he mounted a little grassy ridge, whence he commanded the whole
sweep of the hill rampart from north to west, and the whole expanse of
the low country beneath, and there stood gazing for some minutes, lost
in many thoughts, while the night fell.

He looked over the central plain of England--the plain which stretches
westward to the Thames and the Berkshire hills, and northward through
the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire lowlands to the basin of the Trent.
An historic plain--symbolic, all of it, to an English eye. There in the
western distance, amid the light-filled mists, lay Oxford; in front of
him was the site of Chalgrove Field, where Hampden got his clumsy death
wound, and Thame, where he died; and far away, to his right, where the
hills swept to the north, he could just discern, gleaming against the
face of the down, the vast scoured cross, whereby a Saxon king had
blazoned his victory over his Danish foes to all the plain beneath.

Aldous Raeburn was a man to feel these things. He had seldom stood on
this high point, in such an evening calm, without the expansion in him
of all that was most manly, most English, most strenuous. If it had not
been so, indeed, he must have been singularly dull of soul. For the
great vi