It was a wonderful valley we had caught her in, all rolling purple hills softly folding and unfolding in one continuous causeway; a narrow valley, and the hills were high and close and gentle, suggesting protection and abundance and never-ending peace. Here and there the vivid green of Winter wheat struck a note of Spring amid all the mauves and ochres of dying things. It was a day on which you had no wish to talk,--you were too happy,--wanted only to wander on and on as in a dream through the mellow vale--one of those days in which the world seems too good to be true, a day of which we feel, "This day can never come again." It was like walking through the Twenty-third Psalm. And, as it closed about us, as we came to our village at nightfall, and the sunshine, like a sinking lake of gold, grew softer and softer behind the uplands, the solid world of rock and tree, and stubble-field and clustered barns, seemed to be growing pure thought--nothing seemed left of it but spirit; and the hills had become as the luminous veil of some ineffable temple of the mysterious dream of the world. "Puvis de Chavannes!" said Colin to me in a whisper. And later I tried to say better what I meant in this song: _Strange, at this still enchanted hour, How things in daylight hard and rough, Iron and stone and cruel power, Turn to such airy, starlit stuff! Yon mountain, vast as Behemoth, Seems but a veil of silver breath; And soundless as a flittering moth, And gentle as the face of death, Stands this stern world of rock and tree Lost in some hushed sidereal dream-- The only living thing a bird, The only moving thing a stream. And, strange to think, yon silent star, So soft and safe amid the spheres-- Could we but see and hear so far-- Is made of thunder, too, and tears._ CHAPTER XVII CONTAINING VALUABLE STATISTICS