There they stopped awhile at
the only inn in the place, and Mr. Hoopdriver took up a position which
commanded the inn door, and mopped his face and thirsted and smoked a
Red Herring cigarette. They remained in the inn for some time. A number
of chubby innocents returning home from school, stopped and formed a
line in front of him, and watched him quietly but firmly for the space
of ten minutes or so. "Go away," said he, and they only seemed quietly
interested. He asked them all their names then, and they answered
indistinct murmurs. He gave it up at last and became passive on his
gate, and so at length they tired of him.

The couple under observation occupied the inn so long that Mr.
Hoopdriver at the thought of their possible employment hungered as well
as thirsted. Clearly, they were lunching. It was a cloudless day, and
the sun at the meridian beat down upon the top of Mr. Hoopdriver's head,
a shower bath of sunshine, a huge jet of hot light. It made his head
swim. At last they emerged, and the other man in brown looked back and
saw him. They rode on to the foot of the down, and dismounting began
to push tediously up that long nearly vertical ascent of blinding white
road, Mr. Hoopdriver hesitated. It might take them twenty minutes to
mount that. Beyond was empty downland perhaps for miles. He decided to
return to the inn and snatch a hasty meal.

At the inn they gave him biscuits and cheese and a misleading pewter
measure of sturdy ale, pleasant under the palate, cool in the throat,
but leaden in the legs, of a hot afternoon. He felt a man of substance
as he emerged in the blinding sunshine, but even by the foot of the down
the sun was insisting again that his skull was too small for his brains.
The hill had gone steeper, the chalky road blazed like a magnesium
light, and his front wheel began an apparently incurable squeaking. He
felt as a man from Mars would feel if he were suddenly transferred to
this planet, about three times as heavy as he was wont to feel. The two
little black figures had vanished over the forehead of the hill. "The
tracks'll be all right," said Mr. Hoopdriver.

That was a comforting reflection. It not only justified a slow progress
up the hill, but at the crest a sprawl on the turf beside the road, to
contemplate the Weald from the south. In a matter of two days he had
crossed that spacious valley, with its frozen surge of green hills, its
little villages and townships here and there, its