Well, and if they don’t remember me, thought I, I can remember them at any rate--they can’t help that; and I _will_ remember them too, and all their kind pleasant ways, and their manlike games, and their queer songs and stories--and the queen of them all, I can carry her in my heart, thank God for that, and every word I ever heard her speak, and every smile I ever saw light up her merry eyes or dimple round her mouth--and the country, too, the fair rich Vale, and the glorious old Hill, they are mine for ever, and all the memories of the slaying of dragons; and of great battles with the Pagan. I wonder whether I shall ever see the old gentleman again who conjured it up for me, and put life into it, and made me feel as if King Alfred and his Saxons were as near and dear to me as Sir Colin Campbell and the brave lads in India! Just then the train stopped at Reading, and the guard put his head in to say we stopped for three minutes, and I could get a glass of ale. So I jumped out and had a glass of ale, and then another; and stamped about the platform till the train started. And when I got into my corner again, I was quite warm and jolly. I have been always used to a good night’s rest, and I daresay the ale made me more sleepy, and so I fell into a kind of doze almost directly. But in my doze the same train of thought went on, and all the people I had been living with and hearing of flitted about in the oddest jumbles, with Elm Close and White Horse Hill for a background. I went through the strangest scenes. One minute I was first cousin to King Alfred, and trying to carry his messages over the Hill to Æthelred, only Joe’s old brown horse would run away with me along the Ridgeway; then I was the leader of the Berkshire old gamesters, playing out the last tie with a highwayman, for a gold-laced hat and pair of buckskin breeches; then I was married--I needn’t say to whom--and we were keeping house under the Hill, and waiting tea for St. George, when he should come down from killing the Dragon. And so it went on, till at last a mist came over the Hill, and all the figures got fainter and fainter, and seemed to be fading away. But as they faded, I could see one great figure coming out clearer through the mist, which I had never noticed before. It was like a grand old man, with white hair and mighty limbs; who looked as old as the hill itself, but yet as if he were as young now as he ever had been,--and at his feet were a pickaxe and spade, and at his side a scythe. But great and solemn as it looked, I felt that the figure was not a man, and I was angry with it,--why should it come in with its great pitiful eyes and smile? why were my brothers and sisters, the men and women, to fade away before it?