away Shepton Mallet was shaken to its foundations by a
tremendous and most diabolical sound, a prolonged lupine yell or yowl,
as if a stupendous wolf, as big, say, as the Anglo-Bavarian brewery, had
howled his loudest and longest. This infernal row, which makes Shepton
seem like a town or village gone raving mad, was merely to inform the
men, and, incidentally, the universe, that it was time for them to knock
off work.

Turning my back on the place, I said to myself, "What a fool I am to be
sure! Why could I not have been satisfied for once with a cup of coffee
with my lunch? I should have saved a shilling, perhaps eighteen-pence,
to rejoice the soul of some poor tramp; and, better still, I could
have discussed some interesting questions with that charming rosy-faced
woman. What, for instance, was the reason of her quarrel with the
apostle; by the by, she never rebuked me for misquoting his words; and
what is the moral effect (as seen through her clear brown eyes) of
the Anglo-Bavarian brewery on the population of the small town and the
neighbouring villages?"

The road I followed from Shepton to Wells winds by the water-side, a
tributary of the Brue, in a narrow valley with hills on either side.
It is a five-mile road through a beautiful country, where there is
practically no cultivation, and the green hills, with brown woods in
their hollows, and here and there huge masses of grey and reddish Bath
stone cropping out on their sides, resembling gigantic castles and
ramparts, long ruined and overgrown with ivy and bramble, produce the
effect of a land dispeopled and gone back to a state of wildness.

A thaw had come that morning, ending the severest frost experienced this
winter anywhere in England, and the valley was alive with birds, happy
and tuneful at the end of January as in April. Looking down on the
stream the sudden glory of a kingfisher passed before me; but the
sooty-brown water-ouzel with his white bib, a haunter, too, of this
water, I did not see. Within a mile or so of Wells I overtook a small
boy who belonged there, and had been to Shepton like me, noticing the
birds. "I saw a kingfisher," I said. "So did I," he returned quickly,
with pride. He described it as a biggish bird with a long neck, but
its colour was not blue--oh, no! I suggested that it was a heron, a
long-necked creature under six feet high, of no particular colour. No,
it was not a heron; and after taking thought, he said, "I think it was a