e inn where, in the days of leisure, the
coach must have stopped for luncheon and burnished pewters of rustic
ale been handed up as straight as possible to outsiders athirst with
the sense of speed. We stopped here for mere gaping joy of its
steep-thatched roof, its latticed windows, its hospitable porch, and
allowed a couple of days to elapse in vague undirected strolls and sweet
sentimental observance of the land before approaching the particular
business that had drawn us on. The region I allude to is a compendium
of the general physiognomy of England. The noble friendliness of the
scenery, its latent old-friendliness, the way we scarcely knew whether
we were looking at it for the first or the last time, made it arrest us
at every step. The countryside, in the full warm rains of the last
of April, had burst into sudden perfect spring. The dark walls of the
hedgerows had turned into blooming screens, the sodden verdure of lawn
and meadow been washed over with a lighter brush. We went forth without
loss of time for a long walk on the great grassy hills, smooth arrested
central billows of some primitive upheaval, from the summits of which
you find half England unrolled at your feet. A dozen broad counties,
within the scope of your vision, commingle their green exhalations.
Closely beneath us lay the dark rich hedgy flats and the copse-chequered
slopes, white with the blossom of apples. At widely opposite points of
the expanse two great towers of cathedrals rose sharply out of a reddish
blur of habitation, taking the mild English light.

We gave an irrepressible attention to this same solar reserve, and found
in it only a refinement of art. The sky never was empty and never idle;
the clouds were continually at play for our benefit. Over against
us, from our station on the hills, we saw them piled and dissolved,
condensed and shifted, blotting the blue with sullen rain-spots,
stretching, breeze-fretted, into dappled fields of grey, bursting into
an explosion of light or melting into a drizzle of silver. We made our
way along the rounded ridge of the downs and reached, by a descent,
through slanting angular fields, green to cottage-doors, a russet
village that beckoned us from the heart of the maze in which the hedges
wrapped it up. Close beside it, I admit, the roaring train bounces out
of a hole in the hills; yet there broods upon this charming hamlet an
old-time quietude that makes a violation of confidence of naming it