There were days, of course, when Hugh's reflections took an irrepressibly optimistic turn. Such was a bright day in the late summer, when the sun shone with a temperate clearness, and big white clouds, like fragments torn from some aerial pack of cotton-wool, moved blithely in the sky. Hugh rode--he was staying at his mother's house--to a little village perched astride on a great ridge. He diverged from the road to visit the ancient church, built of massive stone and roofed with big stone-tiles; up there, swept by strong winds, splashed by fierce rains, it had grown to look like a crag rather than a building. By the side of it ran a little, steep, narrow lane, which he had never explored; he rode cautiously down the stony track, among thick hazel copses; occasionally, through a gap, he had a view of a great valley, all wild with wood; once or twice he passed a timbered farmhouse, with tall brick chimneys. The country round about was much invaded by new, pert houses, but there were none here; and Hugh supposed that this road, which seemed the only track into the valley, was of so forbidding a steepness that it had not occurred to any one to settle there. The road became more and more precipitous, and at the very bottom, having descended nearly three hundred feet, Hugh found himself in a very beautiful place. He thought he had never seen anything more sweetly, more characteristically English. On one side was a rough field, encircled by forest on all sides; here stood some old wooden sheds and byres; and one or two green rides passed glimmering into the thick copse, with a charming air of mystery, as though they led to some sequestered woodland paradise. To the right was a mill, with a great pond thick with bulrushes and water-lilies, full of water-birds, coots and moorhens, which swam about, uttering plaintive cries. The mill was of wood, the planks warped and weather-stained, the tiled root covered with mosses; the mill-house itself was a quaint brick building, with a pretty garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, sloping down to the pool; a big flight of pigeons circled round and round in the breeze, turning with a sudden clatter of wings; behind the house were small sandstone bluffs, fringed with feathery ashes, and the wood ran up steeply above into the sky. It looked like an old steel-engraving, like a picture by Morland or Constable. The blue smoke went up from the chimneys in that sheltered nook, rising straight into the air, lending a rich colour to the trees behind. Hugh thought it would be a beautiful place to live in, so remote from the world, in that still valley, where the only sound was the wind in the copses, the trickle of the mill-leat, and the slow thunder of the dripping wheel within. Yet he supposed that the simple people who lived there were probably unconscious of its beauty, and only aware that the roads which led to the spot were inconveniently steep.