[Sidenote: A HANDFUL OF EARTH] I thought of all the changes that Wenlock had seen, beginning with the foundation of the Saxon nunnery. Then later of Roger de Montgomery's Clugniac monks--the fame of the great Abbey, the Dissolution, poor John Cressage, its last Prior, the Civil Wars, and the breaking up of the Abbey fabric through the nineteenth century. Life often seems to go so slowly, and yet how many changes Wenlock--and for that matter, every yard of English soil--has seen, since the dawn of English history, up to this twentieth century. Here we were in the year 1904, I mused, and this little plot of ground on which I sat had seen a Saxon saint go by. It had been traversed by Roger de Montgomery, Cromwell's soldiers had fired across it with cannon, and all the while, sun and rain had had their turns, and soft spring showers had rejoiced daisy and lady's-slipper. Deep winter snows had enshrined tomb and arch, and all the natural changes of season and climate had occurred, and will recur to the end of time. Ah, there are many thoughts to ponder over merely in a handful of British earth! As I sat on, lost in thought, my great hound's head resting at my feet, the silence was broken by the sound of the old church clock. It struck eleven. I touched the grass at my feet: it was wet with dew. From behind me as I rose came strongly in a soft breeze all the perfumes of the sweet things then in flower, and as I passed out of the cloisters my last vision was the mead of narcissi nodding softly in the night wind. Mouse and I turned back out of the lily gate, and so into the quadrangle. Light flashed from the hanging lamps in the ambulatory, and I heard in the distance the refrain of an old Brittany song, that Auguste was singing in his kitchen. Half an hour later not a sound, and the lights were put out, and all was still. Only the scents of the honeysuckle and the budding lilac reached me from my open casement, and the cry of the corncrake, which seemed mysteriously to record the passing of the hours and the passing of all things--Kings, Queens, Abbots, Kingdoms and Commonwealths. So musing I fell asleep. Several weeks later I rose "betimes," as they say here, and whilst the dew was lying like a mantle of diamonds on the glistening turf. I stepped off to the old red-walled garden and visited the beds of tulips. My late tulips were all out in a blaze of beauty--rose, red, white, yellow, and gold, whilst some were splashed with sombre purple. On the walls, the creepers were all clad in green, and the honeysuckles cast their perfume in all the corners of the garden. But I did not stop to linger; a wild spirit was on me, and I made my way across the golden meadows, past the fern-clad hill, and beyond what folks call here the paddock. I walked on, faithful Mouse following closely, until I reached the bottom of the hill on which the hamlet of Wyke is built, and then I turned to the north, and retraced my steps by Farley Dingle.