loft
pole in hand, brown and fierce, on an old-fashioned sign, as he and his
progenitors had probably swung for two centuries or more.

"Is this Enderley?" I asked.

"Not quite, but near it. You never saw the sea? Well, from this point
I can show you something very like it. Do you see that gleaming bit in
the landscape far away? That's water--that's our very own Severn,
swelled to an estuary. But you must imagine the estuary--you can only
get that tiny peep of water, glittering like a great diamond that some
young Titaness has flung out of her necklace down among the hills."

"David, you are actually growing poetical."

"Am I? Well, I do feel rather strange to-day--crazy like; a high wind
always sends me half crazy with delight. Did you ever feel such a
breeze? And there's something so gloriously free in this high level
common--as flat as if my Titaness had found a little Mont Blanc, and
amused herself with patting it down like a dough-cake."

"A very culinary goddess."

"Yes! but a goddess after all. And her dough-cake, her mushroom, her
flattened Mont Blanc, is very fine. What a broad green sweep--nothing
but sky and common, common and sky. This is Enderley Flat. We shall
come to its edge soon, where it drops abruptly into such a pretty
valley. There, look down--that's the church. We are on a level with
the top of its tower. Take care, my lad,"--to the post-boy, who was
crossing with difficulty the literally "pathless waste."--"Don't lurch
us into the quarry-pits, or topple us at once down the slope, where we
shall roll over and over--facilis descensus Averni--and lodge in Mrs.
Tod's garden hedge."

"Mrs. Tod would feel flattered if she knew Latin. You don't look upon
our future habitation as a sort of Avernus?"

John laughed merrily. "No, as I told you before, I like Enderley Hill.
I can't tell why, but I like it. It seems as if I had known the place
before. I feel as if we were going to have great happiness here."

And as he spoke, his unwonted buoyancy softened into a quietness of
manner more befitting that word "happiness." Strange word! hardly in
my vocabulary. Yet, when he uttered it, I seemed to understand it and
to be content.

We wound a little way down the slope, and came in front of Rose
Cottage. It was well named. I never in my life had seen such a bush
of bloom. They hung in clusters--those roses--a dozen in a group;
pressing their pinky cheeks together in a mass of fami