Peter finally quartered himself upon a lonely farm in Worcestershire. The estate was large and wild, running down steep hills and banks to a brook and tiny falls of water. The family who owned it scraped a livelihood from odds and ends of country employment. They had some orchard, and pasture for half a dozen cows. But there was no arable, and they made up a yearly deficit by receiving visitors from the town. Peter had the place to himself, and the peace of it was deeply refreshing. The house stood high, whence the shapely hills of the country were visible--Malvern hanging like a small cloud on the horizon. For many days he lay in the June sun, listening to the stir of leaves, watching with curiosity the lives of small creatures he could not name. In deepest luxury he sat day by day on a fallen trunk across the stream, grateful after the blazing descent of a broken hill for the cool shade of trees meeting overhead, watching a fish lying under the bank or rising to snap at a fly. Or he would be buried in grass, softly topped by the light wind, diverted after long, empty moments by the appearance of a rabbit or a bird not suspecting him. Peter dreamed away whole days, utterly vacant of thought, recording things. He counted the number of times a glossy black cow, munching beside him, masticated her food between each return of the cud. There was a horse which had brought his trunk to the house who always stood with his head thrust through a gap in the hedge. Peter watched the flies collect upon his eyelids, and waited lazily for the blink which regularly dispersed them in a tiny cloud. Peter, in reaction from the fruitless activity of his last months in London, rested and was pleased. It seemed as he lay upon the earth that the scent of the grass was life enough; that reality, humming in wings of the air, in the splashing of water, in noises of the cattle, was sufficient for his uninquiring day. He took an enormous pleasure in small material things--the spiriting of warm milk into the pail; the breath of an old dog as he stood, watchful and erect, in the cold morning; the slow, graceful sweeping of a scythe; the shining of the first star after sunset; the clipping of hot fingers into the brook; the odour of ham frizzling in the farmer's pan.