In this hour, after noon on a day of mid September, the light was changing, not gradually at the sun's proper declension, but under the forces of a south-west wind bringing up vapour at twenty miles an hour from the distant sea. From the rounded and weathered masses of the Beacon, the hill sloped abruptly and a receding foreground of dying fern and grey, granite boulders broke on a gap of such extent that earth, reappearing far below, was already washed by the milky azure of the air, through which it glimmered and receded and presently again rose to lofty lands beyond. The ground plan was a mighty cup, over which the valley undulated, rising here to knap and knoll, falling there into coombs and plains, sinking to its lowest depths immediately beneath the view point, where Dart wound about lesser hills, not small in themselves, yet dwarfed by the greatness of the expanse and the loftiness of the horizon's brim. Upon that distant and irregular line, now melting into the thick air, border heights and saliencies sank and rose, repeating on a vaster scale the anatomy of the river basin. They lifted through the hazes until they faded upon the sight into the gathering clouds, that loomed still full of light, above their grey confines. The sea was long since hidden. A chief quality of this spectacle appeared in the three dissimilar and different coverings that draped it. The body of the earth lay wrapped in a triple robe, and each garment was slashed and broken, so that its texture flowed into and revealed the others. Every furlong of these rolling leagues, save only where the river looped and twined through the middle distance, was clad with forest, with field, or with wilderness of heath and stone; and all, preserving their special qualities, added character of contrast to their neighbours. There was not a monotonous passage from east to west in this huge spectacle. Tilth and meadow oozed out through coppice and hanger; the forests ascended the steep places and fledged the hills, only drooping their dark wings where furze and stone climbed higher still, until they heaved upon the sky. The immemorial heights changed not, save to the painting of the seasons; the woods, that seemed as ancient as they, were largely the work of man, even as the tesselated patterns of the fields that spread, shorn of their corn, or still green with their roots, among them. The verdant patchwork of mangel and swede, the grey of arrish, and the gloom of freshly broken earth bosomed out in gentle arcs among the forests, breaking their ragged edges with long, smooth billows of colour. They shone against the summer sobriety of the trees, for the solid masses of the foliage were as yet scarcely stained with the approaching breath of the fall. But woodlands welcomed the light also, and the sunshine, though already softened by a gathering haze that advanced before the actual clouds, still beat into the copse and spinney, to fringe with a