rming and
delightful!'

I had not counted on this sort of thing, and glanced for help to Edward,
who, hands in pockets, looked grimly down his nose. He had taken his
line, and meant to stick to it.

Meantime our friend had made an imaginary spy-glass out of his fist, and
was squinting through it at something I could not perceive. 'What an
exquisite bit!' he burst out. 'Fifteenth century--no--yes it is!'

I began to feel puzzled, not to say alarmed. It reminded me of the
butcher in the _Arabian Nights_, whose common joints, displayed on the
shop-front, took to a startled public the appearance of dismembered
humanity. This man seemed to see the strangest things in our dull,
familiar surroundings.

'Ah!' he broke out again, as we jogged on between hedgerows: 'and that
field now--backed by the downs--with the rain-cloud brooding over
it,--that's all David Cox--every bit of it!'

'That field belongs to Farmer Larkin,' I explained politely; for of
course he could not be expected to know. 'I'll take you over to Farmer
Cox's to-morrow, if he's a friend of yours; but there's nothing to see
there.'

Edward, who was hanging sullenly behind, made a face at me, as if to
say, 'What sort of lunatic have we got here?'

'It has the true pastoral character, this country of yours,' went on our
enthusiast: 'with just that added touch in cottage and farmstead, relics
of a bygone art, which makes our English landscape so divine, so
unique!'

Really this grasshopper was becoming a burden! These familiar fields and
farms, of which we knew every blade and stick, had done nothing that I
knew of to be bespattered with adjectives in this way. I had never
thought of them as divine, unique, or anything else. They were--well,
they were just themselves, and there was an end of it. Despairingly I
jogged Edward in the ribs, as a sign to start rational conversation, but
he only grinned and continued obdurate.

'You can see the house now,' I remarked presently; 'and that's Selina,
chasing the donkey in the paddock. Or is it the donkey chasing Selina? I
can't quite make out; but it's _them_, anyhow.'

Needless to say, he exploded with a full charge of adjectives.
'Exquisite!' he rapped out; 'so mellow and harmonious! and so entirely
in keeping!' (I could see from Edward's face that he was thinking who
ought to be in keeping.) 'Such possibilities of romance, now, in those
old gables!'

'If you mean the garrets,' I said, 'there's a lot of old