Wendover (Which Was My Next Stage) Lies In The Same Valley With
Great Missenden, But At The Foot Of It,
Where the hills trend off
on either hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain
lies, like
A sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had
a good outlook over the place. The vale, as it opened out into the
plain, was shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of
graceful convolutions. From the level to which I have now attained
the fields were exposed before me like a map, and I could see all
that bustle of autumn field-work which had been hid from me
yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as
I followed the footpath. Wendover lay well down in the midst, with
mountains of foliage about it. The great plain stretched away to
the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of
the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river,
and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the
ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon. The sky was an opal-grey,
touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets
that looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the
autumnal woods below. I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their
horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and,
from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells.
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