For supper, bed, and picture gallery my host at Watlington charged me two shillings, and called me at five into the bargain, as I wished to breakfast at Wallingford. I took the turning to Ewelme out of the Oxford road, and was soon high up among large, low-hedged fields of undulating arable, with here and there a mass or a troop of elms at a corner, above a farm, or down a hedge. Farther away on the left I had the Chilterns, wooded on their crests and in their hollows, not very high, but shapely. The sky was misted at the horizon, but overhead milky blue, with thin-spun, dim white cloud; the sun a burning disc; half-way up the sky hung heavier white clouds, which might develop later. The road was clover-edged, winding, and undulating, and by no means an improbable connection of the Icknield Way. Britwell Salome Church lay on my right, across a willowy field, and having no tower or spire, it was like one of the farm buildings surrounding it. Then my road mounted between nettly and elmy banks, and had a bit of waste on the right where chalk had been dug--a pretty tumbled piece, all nettles and gix and white bryony under ash trees. There was not much hedge between the road and the corn before I got to the “Plough” at Britwell Salome, and next the “Sun.” The village was scattered among trees, not interrupting the smell of hay. The road skirted it, and was soon out again amongst the wheat, and passing Britwell park, where the cattle were crossing in a straight line between groups of elms. In the hedge there was bracken along with the yellow bedstraw and white bryony. For a time there were gorse and bracken together on the green strip above the road. Then, instead of going straight on to Benson, I turned to the left for Firebrass Hill, Ewelme, and Wallingford. Beyond this turn all the country round was high, bare cornland undulating to the darker hills. The road had nettles for a hedge, or sometimes brier, scabious, knap-weed, and rest-harrow, and once some more purple meadow crane’s-bill; it had steep banks, but no green border. But this was not the Icknield Way, which would never have dipped down to the lower part of Ewelme and up again at once. The first houses of the village were decent, small ones, standing high and looking down at the farm-house thatch, the cottages, gardens of fruit trees, and elms of the main village. The churchyard covered the slope down from the upper to the lower village, and in the midst stood the church, a venerable one with a particularly neat growth of ivy across the tower. I could not get into the church, but could hear the clock ticking in the emptiness. In the churchyard I noticed this devout fancy over the body of Alice Heath, who died in 1776:-- Kind angels, watch this sleeping dust Till Jesus comes to raise the just; Then may they wake with sweet surprise And in their Saviour’s image rise. [Illustration: Watlington Town Hall.]