ommon tree in this place,
and from every high point on the road I saw far before me and on either
hand the woods and copses all a tawny yellow gold--the hue of the dying
oak leaf. The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among
tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it where beeches
grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left hand shining through
the wood gave the coloured translucent leaves an unimaginable splendour.
This was the very effect which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had
sought to reproduce in their noblest work--the Gothic cathedral and
church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass. The only
choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and the small lyrical
wren; but on passing through the rustic village of Wolverton I
stopped for a couple of minutes to listen to the lively strains of a
cirl-bunting among some farm buildings.

Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village and the
vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and thorn, of ancient
Roman Calleva. Inside the walls, at one spot, a dozen men were still at
work in the fading light; they were just finishing--shovelling earth
in to obliterate all that had been opened out during the year. The old
flint foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches and
corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the winter room with
its wide beautiful floor--red and black and white and grey and yellow,
with geometric pattern and twist and scroll and flower and leaf and
quaint figures of man and beast and bird--all to be covered up with
earth so that the plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow
and ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead city
for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls had a reddish
cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red tile and tessera mixed
with it. Larks and finches were busily searching for seeds in the
reddish-brown soil. They would soon be gone to their roosting-places
and the tired men to their cottages, and the white owl coming from his
hiding-place in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he
has had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into silence
so long ago.

Chapter Ten: The Last of His Name

I came by chance to the village--Norton, we will call it, just to call
it something, but the county in which it is situated need not be named.
It happened that abou