It Is A Salutary Exercise,
Besides; It Is Salutary To Get Out Of Ourselves And See People
Living Together In Perfect Unconsciousness Of Our Existence, As
They Will Live When We Are Gone.
If to-morrow the blow falls, and
the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none
The less
tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their
salad, and go orderly to bed.
The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a
thrill in the air like a reminiscence of frost. I went up into the
sloping garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough,
to the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars. She had been
so much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
hovered over by white butterflies. And now, look at the end of it!
She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense. And, indeed,
unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the
composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide
intelligibly upon the issue raised. Then I fell into a long and
abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box
of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself. We
tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary
allowance for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a
triumphant conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small
lacuna in my information. I did not know the circumference of the
earth. The landlord knew it, to be sure - plainly he had made the
same calculation twice and once before, - but he wanted confidence
in his own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a
second seemed to lose all interest in the result.
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. All these noises came to me very
thin and distinct in the clear air. There was a wonderful
sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.
I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky
footholds cut in the turf. The hills about Wendover and, as far as
I could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood
of beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and
hung down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of
lying flatly along the summit. The trees grew so close, and their
boughs were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense
as a bush of heather. The prevailing colour was a dull,
smouldering red, touched here and there with vivid yellow. But the
autumn had scarce advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost
summer in the heart of the wood; and as soon as I had scrambled
through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green forest atmosphere
under eaves of virgin foliage. In places where the wood had itself
for a background and the trees were massed together thickly, the
colour became intensified and almost gem-like: a perfect fire
green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned
and wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke
the light up pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of
slim, straight tree-stems with the light running down them as down
the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to
something, and led only to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle.
Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the
light lying flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark
background it seemed almost luminous. There was a great bush over
the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood);
and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the
occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth,
had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet
carpeting of last year's leaves.
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