As I entered Dunstable there was already a touch of night in the light, and it fell with a sad blessing upon the low-towered church and the sheep grazing in the churchyard up above the road on my left. The crossing of the Icknield Way and Watling Street makes Dunstable. Watling Street was wider and had the town hall, the post office, the bigger shops, and the chief inns. The Icknield Way, known first as Church Street, then as West Street, was the more rustic, humble, and informal, and beyond the crossing it had trees by its side; and this seemed natural and just. It had become thoroughly suburban before leaving the town and coming to the smooth high downs on the left, where children were playing and girls walking about above a field of barley and charlock beside the road. On my right there was a wide border of level down turf and no hedge between it and the corn. The downs, or I should say the Chiltern Hills, proceeded majestically southward, but six or seven miles away advanced somewhat to the east, half clothed in woods, until the bare Beacon Hill stopped steep and abrupt above a high plateau of cornland which fell away into a broad, wooded lowland on my right. Round this Beacon I could see that my road would bend; I thought I could see the ledge it must follow. In that lower land on my right there were several rises. Such was the smooth, easy sweep of Toternhoe, close to Luton; such the wooded heave upon which rose the dark, noble tower of Edlesborough Church; and such the terraced hill near Edlesborough, with a few thorns on the slopes between the terraces, and at its foot a long, neat orchard of late plums or “prunes.” The broad, wayside strip on the right hand sometimes showed the old course of my way much below the level of the present road; and after Well Head this lower course was beyond and below the modern hedge. On the left, at Well Head, I noticed a little hill on this side of the main ridge very prettily terraced, with thorns on the slopes between the terraces. At Well Head a deep, smooth-sided cleft winds away to Dolittle Mill, with the first waters of the Ouse. A similar cleft a mile or so beyond, at the Cross Waters, close to the entrance into Buckinghamshire, carries water to the mills of Eaton Bray. As I came out of Dunstable I thought there could be nothing there equal to the sweep of the downs before me, ending in the wooded Ivinghoe Hills and the Beacon. But when I had gone more than half-way towards the end of the sweep I looked back and saw that the downs behind me were equal to those I was approaching, and even advanced a little out of the straight like the others, ending also in a promontory above Dunstable. The air was now still and the earth growing dark and already very quiet. But the sky was light and its clouds of utmost whiteness were very wildly and even fiercely shaped, so that it seemed the playground of powerful and wanton spirits knowing nothing of earth. And this dark earth appeared a small though also a