and land--as
unsubstantial as itself. Even living, moving things had that aspect. Far
out on the lowest further strip of sand, which appeared to be on a level
with the sea, gulls were seen standing in twos and threes and small
groups and in rows; but they did not look like gulls--familiar birds,
gull-shaped with grey and white plumage. They appeared twice as big as
gulls, and were of a dazzling whiteness and of no definite shape: though
standing still they had motion, an effect of the quivering dancing air,
the "visible heat"; at rest, they were seen now as separate objects;
then as one with the silver sparkle on the sea; and when they rose
and floated away they were no longer shining and white, but like pale
shadows of winged forms faintly visible in the haze.

They were not birds but spirits--beings that lived in or were passing
through the world and now, like the heat, made visible; and I, standing
far out on the sparkling sands, with the sparkling sea on one side and
the line of dunes, indistinctly seen as land, on the other, was one of
them; and if any person had looked at me from a distance he would have
seen me as a formless shining white being standing by the sea, and then
perhaps as a winged shadow floating in the haze. It was only necessary
to put out one's arms to float. That was the effect on my mind: this
natural world was changed to a supernatural, and there was no more
matter nor force in sea or land nor in the heavens above, but only
spirit.

Chapter Six: By Swallowfield

One of the most attractive bits of green and wooded country near London
I know lies between Reading and Basingstoke and includes Aldermaston
with its immemorial oaks in Berkshire and Silchester with Pamber Forest
in Hampshire. It has long been one of my favourite haunts, summer and
winter, and it is perhaps the only wooded place in England where I have
a home feeling as strong as that which I experience in certain places
among the South Wiltshire downs and in the absolutely flat country on
the Severn, in Somerset, and the flat country in Cambridgeshire and East
Anglia, especially at Lynn and about Ely.

I am now going back to my first visit to this green retreat; it was in
the course of one of those Easter walks I have spoken of, and the way
was through Reading and by Three Mile Cross and Swallowfield. On this
occasion I conceived a dislike to Reading which I have never quite got
over, for it seemed an unconscionably big pl