Two miles, therefore, before he reached Emberton, he turned off from the high-road, and having by this time refreshed all his boyish recollections of the country round, he directed his course to a hamlet, which lay at the distance of about a mile and a half from Ryebury, and which was possessed of a little public-house, in the stable of which he could put up his horse, while he himself proceeded on foot to the dwelling of the miser. The sun was just down as he reached the hamlet; and after having examined, with habitual care, the accommodation for his horse, he walked out, and took his way towards Ryebury, in the midst of as splendid an evening as ever poured through the autumnal sky. A flood of rich purple was gushing from the west, with two or three soft clouds of rose colour, and gold, hanging about the verge of the sky, while all the rest was blue, "with one star looking through it, like an eye." On his right, lay the rich cultivated lands between Emberton and Ryebury; so full of tall trees, hedgerows, masses of planting and park, that the yellow stubble fields, or the fresh ploughed fallow, could hardly be perceived amidst the warm, though withering greens of the foliage. On his left, lay a high wooded bank, above which, peered up the edge of a more distant field; and beyond it again the hills, and wide downs, that stretched away towards the sea-side, in the dim purple shadow, that covered all that part of the prospect, taking an aspect of wide and dreary solitude, very different from the gay sunshiny look the whole assumed in the daytime. Yet the scene, though full of repose, was any thing but melancholy. The partridges were calling in the fields round about, the blackbirds were flying on, from bush to bush, before the passenger, with that peculiar note, something between a twitter and song, with which they conclude their melody for the year, and some gay laughing voices in the hamlet, which he had just left behind, came mellowed by the distance, and seemed to speak of hearts at rest, and the day's labour done. As Beauchamp walked slowly on, with feelings in his bosom which harmonized indeed with the scene, but which carried all that was solemn in the aspect of the dying day into a sense of profound dejection, the light waned; and though the purple became of a still richer hue, the blue assumed also a deeper shade; the stars looked out as if to supply the place of the glory that was passing away, and the long shadows of the high grounds around, spread something more than twilight through the valley.