He had often gone up to play in the dales, and of all his dances he had liked these best. First of all came the journey, which was always an adventure in itself. Some sudden turn from the high road to the north, and he was plunged in a twisting lane between the hills. Already, perhaps, it would be dusk, because of the barrier to the west, which grew and darkened and grew as the shadows gathered and trailed. He himself was small as a gnat on the thread of road, between the monsters soaring on either side. There would be water talking out of the shadows here and there, hidden streams and falls with the last light flashing on their manes. Always he heard the water-talk when he went into the dales, because it was so different from the voice of his own sea. And, greater than the water, was the stillness, that nothing was ever big enough to break, neither the shrill dogs nor the shepherds’ whistle nor the cry of the sheep. Even thunder and wind could only trouble it for a time, like the floating of furious smoke across a glass. Behind them you felt the imperturbable patience of a greater strength. It was a different stillness from the empty silences of the marsh. It was the live stillness of great bodies, crowded side by side, whom even Nature seemed powerless to stir. His journey’s end was always some farmhouse, where he had a meal before starting for the dance. From these dwellings, which he often saw only by night, he carried pictures of shadowy rafters and firelit walls, blind staircases to which he trusted himself as to a horse knowing its way, and clean, bare rooms upstairs where a lighted candle seemed to bring the mountains into the house itself. After the meal he groped his way at a lantern’s tail to the festive barn. He could trace the hedges by the shadowy line along their tops, and smell the smell of earth that is damp in the night, and hear the sheep-wail out of the void. And then, in the midst of the dark, that was either smooth blackness or full of looming shapes, the door of the barn would open a yellow port-hole to the night. He left the night with regret, although he grew in stature as he went in, and the fiddle, too, increased in weight and power. Out in the dale it had seemed a tinkling thing, but once inside its voice was proud and strong. On the rough platform or the corner chair where they spent the night, he and his fiddle came proudly into their own.