almost branchless trees on the ridge of the Beacon above Sancreed--a procession that seems even at mid-day to move in another world, in the world and in the age of the stone circles and cairns and cromlechs of the moor beyond. The sycamore and elder that surround and tower above Tregonebris near Boscawen Un. The avenue of ash and elm and wych-elm and sycamore, very close together, leading from grey Nancothan mill, where the dark-brown water mingles its noise with the rustling trees. The wych-elms and golden-fruited sycamores about the roads near St. Hilary, and the long avenue of ash up to the church itself, and the elms through which the evening music floats, amidst the smell of hay, in a misty mountained sunset. Under the flaming fleeces of a precipitous sky, in a windless hush and at low tide, I descended to a narrow distinct valley just where a stream ran clear and slow through level sands to a bay, between headlands of rocks and of caves among the rocks. The sides of the valley near the sea were high and steep and of grass until their abrupt end in a low but perpendicular wall of rock just above the river sands. Inland the valley began to wind and at the bend trees came darkly trooping down the slopes to the water. Immediately opposite the ford--the wet sands being unscathed by any foot or hoof or wheel--a tributary ran into the river through a gorge of its own. It was a gorge not above a hundred feet across, and its floor was of sand save where the brook was running down, and this floor was all in shadow because the banks were clothed in thick underwood and in ash, sycamore, wych-elm and oak meeting overhead. And in these sands also there was no footprint save of the retreated sea. There was no house, nor wall, nor road. And there was no sound in the caverns of foliage except one call of a cuckoo as I entered and the warbling of a blackbird that mused in the oaks and then laughed and was silent and mused again and filled the mind with the fairest images of solitude--solitude where a maid, thinking of naught, unthought of, unseen, combs out her yellow hair and lets her spirit slip down into the tresses--where a man fearful of his kind ascends out of the deeps of himself so that his eyes look bravely and his face unstiffens and unwrinkles and his motion and gesture is fast and free--where a child walks and stops and runs and sings in careless joy that takes him winding far out into abysses of eternity and makes him free of them, so that years afterward the hour and place and sky return, and the eternity on which they opened as a casement, but not the child, not the joy.