The whole place was wrapped in Sabbath stillness; milking was over, and a distant line of red and dappled cows was vanishing down the lane, followed by one or two of the dairy ‘chaps,’ with white pinners protecting their Sunday clothes. Save for the calves, which thrust their blunt, moist noses through the bars of their enclosure, and the fowl cackling lazily as they lay sunning themselves in the angle of the barn, the barton was absolutely deserted. ‘We drained the big mead four years ago,’ said Rosalie, ‘and threw the twenty-acre into it; ’t is beautiful pasture now. Would you like to see it?’ Richard hurriedly expressed a desire to that effect, and the two betook themselves in silence along a narrow farm-track to the rear of the house, which led to the field in question. They walked with the breadth of the lane between them, and in unbroken silence; their eyes, by common accord, gazing straight in front, and both secretly rebelling against the expedient which Isaac had deemed so happily devised. At length they came to a gate set in the hedge, and turned to look over it. A great green expanse stretched away before their gaze, meeting the sky-line on one side where it sloped upwards, and melting on the other into the lighter, more delicate green of springing corn; beyond were the woods, which, as well as the low line of hills behind them, were covered by a gentle haze. Richard leaned his elbows on the topmost rail of the gate, and his face gradually cleared as his eyes roamed over the landscape. This county of Dorset has given birth to more than one great writer of lowly origin, whose early nurture amid field, and heath, and woodland has fostered an intimate and loving sympathy with Nature, to which each in turn has given exquisite expression. Richard Marshall, born of the same sturdy peasant stock, brought up amid the same pastoral surroundings, possessed a somewhat kindred spirit, though he was denied this gift of expression. Yet the inglorious rustic Milton was not always mute; he had read so much, and meditated so much, and, above all, felt so deeply, that at times something of what he thought and felt struggled to his lips and found vent in words, inadequate, indeed, but suggestive. ‘How beautiful it all is!’ he said, turning to Rosalie, with a very poet’s rapture in his eyes. ‘It seems to fill one like music.’ ‘Yet I suppose you have seen far finer sights during your travels,’ returned she, speaking naturally for the first time, as she too leaned over the gate. ‘Finer things? Oh, yes, perhaps; but this homely beauty touches me as no other sight could do. Something about a great sketch of green like this always affects me curiously. I love these wide fields.’