All The Time As I Went On I Never Forgot
It Was The Sabbath; The Stillness Was A Perpetual Reminder; And I Heard
In Spirit The Church-Bells Clamouring All Over Europe, And The Psalms Of
A Thousand Churches.
At length a human sound struck upon my ear - a cry strangely modulated
between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a
little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and
dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance.
But the rogue had
picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood,
driving Modestine; and he made me the compliments of the new country in
this tremulous high-pitched salutation. And as all noises are lovely and
natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much clean
hill air and crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my ear,
and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the river.
A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at
Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.
PONT DE MONTVERT
One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I
remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of
other novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England
from a town in France, or even in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you
are in the one country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure
that you are in the other.
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