ittle bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions. From the
level to which I have now attained the fields were exposed before me
like a map, and I could see all that bustle of autumn field-work which
had been hid from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only
for a moment as I followed the footpath. Wendover lay well down in the
midst, with mountains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched
away to the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern
of the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river, and
snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the ambiguous
cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey, touched here and
there with blue, and with certain faint russets that looked as if they
were reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods below. I could hear
the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks
innumerable overhead, and, from a field where the shepherd was
marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells. All
these noises came to me very thin and distinct in the clear air. There
was a wonderful sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and
the place.

I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky footholds
cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover, and, as far as I could see,
all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech
plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been suffered to
extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about the
shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along the
summit. The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so matted
together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather. The
prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and there
with vivid yellow. But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond the
outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the wood; and as
soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green
forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin foliage. In places where the
wood had itself for a background and the trees were massed together
thickly, the colour became intensified and almost gem-like: a perfect
fire of green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of
autumn gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew wel