I Fled On To
Newbury In Quest Of Warmth And Light, And Found It Indoors,
But The Town Was Deep In The Fog.
The next day I ventured out again to look for the sun, and
found it not, but my ramble was not without its reward.
In a
pine wood three miles from the town I stood awhile to listen
to the sound as of copious rain of the moisture dropping from
the trees, when a sudden tempest of loud, sharp metallic
notes - a sound dear to the ornithologist's ears - made me jump;
and down into the very tree before which I was standing
dropped a flock of about twenty crossbills. So excited and
noisy when coming down, the instant they touched the tree they
became perfectly silent and motionless. Seven of their number
had settled on the outside shoots, and sat there within forty
feet of me, looking like painted wooden images of small green
and greenish-yellow parrots; for a space of fifteen minutes
not the slightest movement did they make, and at length,
before going, I waved my arms about and shouted to frighten
them, and still they refused to stir.
Next morning that memorable fog lifted, to England's joy, and
quitting my refuge I went out once more into the region of
high sheep-walks, adorned with beechen woods and
traveller's-joy in the hedges, rambling by Highclere,
Burghclere, and Kingsclere. The last - Hampshire's little
Cuzco - is a small and village-like old red brick town,
unapproached by a railroad and unimproved, therefore still
beautiful, as were all places in other, better, less civilized
days. Here in the late afternoon a chilly grey haze crept
over the country and set me wishing for a fireside and the
sound of friendly voices, and I turned my face towards beloved
Silchester. Leaving the hills behind me I got away from the
haze and went my devious way by serpentine roads through a
beautiful, wooded, undulating country. And I wish that for a
hundred, nay, for a thousand years to come, I could on each
recurring November have such an afternoon ride, with that
autumnal glory in the trees. Sometimes, seeing the road
before me carpeted with pure yellow, I said to myself, now I
am coming to elms; but when the road shone red and russet-gold
before me I knew it was overhung by beeches. But the oak is
the common tree in this place, and from every high point on
the road I saw far before me and on either hand the woods and
copses all a tawny yellow gold - the hue of the dying oak leaf.
The tall larches were lemon-yellow, and when growing among
tall pines produced a singular effect. Best of all was it
where beeches grew among the firs, and the low sun on my left
hand shining through the wood gave the coloured translucent
leaves an unimaginable splendour. This was the very effect
which men, inspired by a sacred passion, had sought to
reproduce in their noblest work - the Gothic cathedral and
church, its dim interior lit by many-coloured stained glass.
The only choristers in these natural fanes were the robins and
the small lyrical wren; but on passing through the rustic
village of Wolverton I stopped for a couple of minutes to
listen to the lively strains of a cirl-bunting among some farm
buildings.
Then on to Silchester, its furzy common and scattered village
and the vast ruinous walls, overgrown with ivy, bramble, and
thorn, of ancient Roman Calleva. Inside the walls, at one
spot, a dozen men were still at work in the fading light; they
were just finishing - shovelling earth in to obliterate all
that had been opened out during the year. The old flint
foundations that had been revealed; the houses with porches
and corridors and courtyards and pillared hypocausts; the
winter room with its wide beautiful floor - red and black and
white and grey and yellow, with geometric pattern and twist
and scroll and flower and leaf and quaint figures of man and
beast and bird - all to be covered up with earth so that the
plough may be driven over it again, and the wheat grow and
ripen again as it has grown and ripened there above the dead
city for so many centuries. The very earth within those walls
had a reddish cast owing to the innumerable fragments of red
tile and tessera mixed with it. Larks and finches were busily
searching for seeds in the reddish-brown soil. They would
soon be gone to their roosting-places and the tired men to
their cottages, and the white owl coming from his hiding-place
in the walls would have old Silchester to himself, as he has
had it since the cries and moans of the conquered died into
silence so long ago.
Chapter Ten: The Last of His Name
I came by chance to the village - Norton, we will call it, just
to call it something, but the county in which it is situated
need not be named. It happened that about noon that day I
planned to pass the night at a village where, as I was
informed at a small country town I had rested in, there was a
nice inn - "The Fox and Grapes" - to put up at, but when I
arrived, tired and hungry, I was told that I could not have a
bed and that the only thing to do was to try Norton, which
also boasted an inn. It was hard to have to turn some two or
three miles out of my road at that late hour on a chance of a
shelter for the night, but there was nothing else to do, so on
to Norton I went with heavy steps, and arrived a little after
sunset, more tired and hungry than ever, only to be told at
the inn that they had no accommodation for me, that their one
spare room had been engaged!
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