After Spending Two Hours At Crux Easton, With That Dense
Immovable Fog Close By, I At Length Took The Plunge To Get To
Highclere.
What a change!
I was at once where all form and
colour and melody had been blotted out. My clothes were hoary
with clinging mist, my fingers numb with cold, and Highclere,
its scattered cottages appearing like dim smudges through the
whiteness, was the dreariest village on earth. 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.
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