All these things, however, were familiar sights to any Ludite. But on the third day (for Ranulph's sake they were taking the journey in easy stages) things began to look different--especially the trees; for instead of acacias, beeches, and willows--familiar living things for ever murmuring their secret to themselves--there were pines and liege-oaks and olives. Inanimate works of art they seemed at first and Ranulph exclaimed, "Oh, look at the funny trees! They are like the old statues of dead people in the Fields of Grammary!" But, as well, they were like an old written tragedy. For if human, or superhuman, experience, and the tragic clash of personality can be expressed by plastic shapes, then one might half believe that these tortured trees had been bent by the wind into the spiritual shape of some old drama. Pines and olives, however, cannot grow far away from the sea. And surely the sea lay to the east of Lud-in-the-Mist, and with each mile they were getting further away from it? It was the sea beyond the Hills of the Elfin Marches--the invisible sea of Fairyland--that caused these pines and olives to flourish. * * * * * It was late in the afternoon when they reached the village of Swan-on-the-Dapple--a score of houses straggling round a triangle of unreclaimed common, on which grew olives and stunted fruit trees, and which was used as the village rubbish heap. In the distance were the low, pine-covered undulations of the Debatable Hills--a fine unchanging background for the changing colours of the seasons. Indeed, they lent a dignity and significance to everything that grew, lay, or was enacted, against them; so that the little children in their blue smocks who were playing among the rubbish on the dingy common as our cavalcade rode past, seemed to be performing against the background of Destiny some tremendous action, similar to the one expressed by the shapes of the pines and olives. When they had left the village, they took a cart-track that branched off from the high-road to the right. It led into a valley, the gently sloping sides of which were covered with vineyards and corn-fields. Sometimes their path led through a little wood of liege-oaks with trunks, where the bark had been stripped, showing as red as blood, and everywhere there were short, wiry, aromatic shrubs, beset by myriads of bees. Every minute the hills seemed to be drawing nearer, and the pines with which they were covered began to stand out from the carpet of heath in a sort of coagulated relief, so that they looked like a thick green scum of watercress on a stagnant purple pond. At last they reached the farm--a fine old manor-house, standing among a cluster of red-roofed barns, and supported, heraldically, on either side by two magnificent plane-trees, with dappled trunks of tremendous girth.