could be heard for miles.
There was the rattle of a returning waggon, mixed with the smacks of the
waggoner's whip: the team must have been at least three miles off. From
far over the hill came the faint periodic yell of kennelled hounds;
while from the nearest village resounded the voices of boys at play in
the twilight. Then a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not from
the direction of the church, but rather from the wood behind him; and he
thought it must be the clock of some mansion that way.

But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up subjects by the
pressure of their material presence, and Somerset's thoughts were often,
to his great loss, apt to be even more than common truants from the
tones and images that met his outer senses on walks and rides. He would
sometimes go quietly through the queerest, gayest, most extraordinary
town in Europe, and let it alone, provided it did not meddle with him
by its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police, coachmen, mongrels, bad
smells, and such like obstructions. This feat of questionable utility he
began performing now. Sitting on the three-inch ash rail that had been
peeled and polished like glass by the rubbings of all the small-clothes
in the parish, he forgot the time, the place, forgot that it was
August--in short, everything of the present altogether. His mind flew
back to his past life, and deplored the waste of time that had resulted
from his not having been able to make up his mind which of the many
fashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic change
was the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered from the
modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man
of his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and experience, who had
never thought specially of the matter, but had blunderingly applied
themselves to whatever form of art confronted them at the moment of
their making a move, were by this time acquiring renown as new lights;
while he was still unknown. He wished that some accident could have
hemmed in his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped him on in a
channel ever so worn.

Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own future,
he was recalled to the scene without by hearing the notes of a familiar
hymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a valley below. He listened more
heedfully. It was his old friend the 'New Sabbath,' which he had never
once heard since the lisping days of ch