ttle budding
gentlewomen, perfectly mounted and equipped, who form to alien eyes one
of the prettiest incidents of English scenery. She had distanced her
servant and, as she came abreast of us, turned slightly in her saddle
and glanced back at him. In the movement she dropped the hunting-crop
with which she was armed; whereupon she reined up and looked shyly at
us and at the implement. "This is something better than a Lely," I
said. Searle hastened forward, picked up the crop and, with a particular
courtesy that became him, handed it back to the rider. Fluttered and
blushing she reached forward, took it with a quick sweet sound, and the
next moment was bounding over the quiet turf. Searle stood watching her;
the servant, as he passed us, touched his hat. When my friend turned
toward me again I saw that he too was blushing. "Oh sir, you're all
right," I repeated.

At a short distance from where we had stopped was an old stone bench. We
went and sat down on it and, as the sun began to sink, watched the light
mist powder itself with gold. "We ought to be thinking of the train back
to London, I suppose," I at last said.

"Oh hang the train!" sighed my companion.

"Willingly. There could be no better spot than this to feel the English
evening stand still." So we lingered, and the twilight hung about us,
strangely clear in spite of the thickness of the air. As we sat there
came into view an apparition unmistakeable from afar as an immemorial
vagrant--the disowned, in his own rich way, of all the English ages. As
he approached us he slackened pace and finally halted, touching his cap.
He was a man of middle age, clad in a greasy bonnet with false-looking
ear-locks depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red
scarf, tucked into his waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote
affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a stick; on
his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of withered
vegetables at the bottom. His face was pale haggard and degraded beyond
description--as base as a counterfeit coin, yet as modelled somehow as
a tragic mask. He too, like everything else, had a history. From what
height had he fallen, from what depth had he risen? He was the perfect
symbol of generated constituted baseness; and I felt before him in
presence of a great artist or actor.

"For God's sake, gentlemen," he said in the raucous tone of
weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat exacerb