If the truth be known, I suspect it deemed us dullish dogs. But we were tiring--not with the jaded weariness begotten of hard roads, when the spine aches and knees stiffen; no, a comfortable lassitude was slackening our joints and bringing thoughts of warm baths and supper. However, our shadows, valiant fellows, swung along before us across the rusty bracken with a cheerful constancy, and, encouraged by their ever-lengthening strides and by the solitude, we even found heart to lift our voices in song. Now and again small birds fled upwards with shrill twitters at our approach, and settled again to resume their interrupted suppers; but after a while they left for their roosts in the rowans and sycamores to the south, and rabbits began to show themselves in the open spaces among the furze. As if reluctantly, the perfect day drew to its close. We raced up the flank of a long ridge to keep the setting sun in view, reaching the crest as it dipped to meet a ragged tor, and sank in a golden glow. A little wind, like a tired sigh, ruffled the tops of the heather, swayed the grass an instant, and was gone. "Ah-h-h!" breathed the Indiarubber Man in the stillness. A thousand feet below us smoke was curling from the thickly wooded valley. It was five miles away, but somewhere amid those trees men brewed and women baked. "Come on," he added tensely. "Beer!" As we descended into the lowlands a widening circle of night was stealing up into the sky--the blue-grey and purple of a pigeon's breast. A single star appeared in the western sky, intensifying the peace of the silent moor behind us. Stumbling through twilit woods and across fields of young barley, we met a great dog-fox _en route_ for someone's poultry-run. He bared his teeth with angry effrontery as he sheered off and gave us a wide berth across the darkening fields. Doubtless he claimed his supremacy of hour and place, as did the sheep-dog that passed us so joyously earlier in the day. And, after all, what were we but interlopers from a lower plane! The thirty-odd miles of our ramble reeled up like a tape-measure as we reached the lane, splashed with moonlight, that led us to the village. The gateway to every field held a pair of lovers whispering among the shadows: yet inexplicably they seemed an adjunct of their surroundings and the faintly bewildering night-scents. A dog sitting at the gate of a cottage uttered a short bark as we neared his domain; then, with a queer grumbling whimper, he came to us across the dust, and perhaps because--as far as is given to man in his imperfections--we had not wittingly done evil that day, he slobbered at our hands. In the flagged and wainscotted parlour of the village inn a child brought us bread and cheese and froth-crested mugs of beer. While we ate and drank, she watched us with tranquil interest in violet-coloured eyes that foretold a sleepless night for some bucolic swain in years to come.