stance only that was grey and cold, and the distance I
could see no longer. Overhead there was a wonderful carolling of larks
which seemed to follow me as I went. Indeed, during all the time I was
in that country the larks did not desert me. The air was alive with them
from High Wycombe to Tring; and as, day after day, their "shrill
delight" fell upon me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a
prominence over other conditions, and form so integral a part of my
conception of the country, that I could have baptised it "The Country of
Larks." This, of course, might just as well have been in early spring;
but everything else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later
year. There was no stir of insects in the grass. The sunshine was more
golden, and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the shadows under
the hedge were somewhat blue and misty. It was only in autumn that you
could have seen the mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and the
fallen leaves that lay about the road, and covered the surface of
wayside pools so thickly that the sun was reflected only here and there
from little joints and pin-holes in that brown coat of proof; or that
your ear would have been troubled, as you went forward, by the
occasional report of fowling-pieces from all directions and all degrees
of distance.

For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
that came to disturb me as I walked. The lanes were profoundly still.
They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing of the
larks. And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling of isolation
that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me quicken my
steps eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road. This
fellow-voyager proved to be no less a person than the parish constable.
It had occurred to me that in a district which was so little populous
and so well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence might play
hide-and-seek with the authorities for months; and this idea was
strengthened by the aspect of the portly constable as he walked by my
side with deliberate dignity and turned-out toes. But a few minutes'
converse set my heart at rest. These rural criminals are very tame
birds, it appeared. If my informant did not immediately lay his hand on
an offender, he was content to wait; some evening after nightfall there
would come a tap at his door, and the outlaw, weary of outlawry, would
give himself quietly up to und