After Highworth we had a hilly road, and this took us without event to Faringdon, where it chanced to be market day, and the little town was crowded with farmers and cattle; there were crowds in its streets, and crowds round its inns, so we made what haste we could to get out of the place. These little country towns, however sleepy generally, manage to be very wide-awake once a week on market days. A long, quiet stretch of road now followed, with wide views on either hand over fertile farming lands. A signpost informed us we were bound for Abingdon; now Abingdon we knew, so to avoid the familiar we after a time turned up a byway and, crossing the Upper Thames on an ancient and very narrow bridge, we presently espied another signpost with "North Moor" upon it; the name suggested wildness, to North Moor we would go. We got on a rare tangle of lanes and into a land monotonously level, but no moor did we find, nothing but hedge-enclosed and tame fields. Curiously enough signposts were plentiful, but only gave the names of villages we had never heard of, and one name meant as much, or as little, to us as another. Eventually we found ourselves by the side of the river again and at Bablockhythe Ferry, of which Matthew Arnold has sung. I asked the name of it, and then I found it on my map, and so our whereabouts. The old ferry boat, the quiet river that was so still it hardly seemed to flow at all, the leafy trees, and the road on the opposite shore winding its white way into a distance of green woods, made such a pretty picture that I was tempted to photograph it. Were I a poet or a landscape painter it is a spot that would inspire me. I waited a long time on the chance of some cattle or sheep to be crossing and so help my picture, but during that time only a cyclist came, and I had to make do with him. The ferryman pulled up his boat to the bank thinking I was about to "go over," but when he told me the opposite road went to Oxford, and it was the nearest way there, I concluded I would not cross but trust to the lanes and the chance of coming upon a country hostel in a fresh land. "Where be you bound for?" asked the ferryman politely. "I might help you, for the roads about here are not gain ones for strangers"--and this though he lost custom for his ferry. It was an awkward question, for I knew not myself, and was nonplussed how to answer him. To be a traveller without a destination seems such a silly thing to the rural mind. I hope he did not take me for some lunatic escaped in a car. It was cool by the river, for the day was growing late, and I thought it about time to search for an inn. There was only a public-house by the ferry, and the land around had a lonely look, so I thought it wise to hasten on.